


The Belonging You Seek

by WiliQueen



Category: Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types
Genre: Ahsoka Tano Lives, Force Ghosts, Force Visions, Gen, Master & Padawan Relationship(s), Nightmares, Post-Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Skywalker Family Feels
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-25
Updated: 2018-03-16
Packaged: 2018-09-02 01:28:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 30,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8646382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WiliQueen/pseuds/WiliQueen
Summary: A chance discovery gives Luke and Leia a glimpse into who Anakin was, and leads them to more than they ever expected. More questions, more answers... and more family.





	1. Chapter 1

_//Ahsoka.//_

Great. It was going to be one of _those_ days.

_//Ahsoka.//_ The voice in her head was getting clearer. _//You have to get up, little one_ . _//_

"I'm not little anymore, master," she grumbled.

_//And I'm not your master anymore. But you still have to get up. You need water. You got that old vaporator working again, remember?//_

It sounded almost as if he were really here, right next to her. That was probably a bad sign. Whatever he was, though, he was right. Blast him.

"Fierfek."

_//Nice language. That one's not my fault, is it?//_

"You're not real."

_//Believe whatever you need to, Snips. Just get up and take care of yourself. They'll come for you, I promise. You just have to hold on a little longer.//_

"Who'll come?"

_//My children.//_

"Your _what_?!" She sat bolt upright, wincing as her head protested the sudden movement. The floor tilted queasily to the left before settling down, but there was no reply.

 

* * *

 

"Instead of trying to run, the captain was barricaded in the records vault, frantically disintegrating files." Leia shook her head. "As if the whole moon weren't evidence. How could anyone think destroying data would hide what they did to those people?"

Luke didn't have an answer, but he was pretty sure she didn't expect one. "Maybe that's not what he was trying to hide."

"Maybe. Anyway, the intel team sorting through what's left found this." She held up a datachip with a battered but sturdy casing, the kind used by infantry units.

"Something about the Jedi?" There were standing orders to direct any such information to him immediately.

"Probably." Leia handed it to him. "It's labeled _Skywalker_."

Luke traced a fingertip over the scuffed letters. They had been etched years before, likely before he was born. The implications weighed the little thing down in his hand, and he looked up at his sister questioningly.

It wasn't easy for him to reconcile the monster that had hunted them with the man who had given them life. For Leia, who had suffered so much more directly at Vader's hands, who hadn't been there at the end, it had so far proved impossible. She wanted nothing to do with him in any form, and Luke really couldn't blame her.

"I can check it out," he suggested, "let you know if there's anything usef--"

"No." Her jaw took on that particular set that said _I can handle this_. "I need to start... I should know."

"Okay." Whatever instinct had led her to decide this unknown quantity was the thing to face head-on, it was decided, and he was the last person to argue. "Artoo?"

The little droid trundled over from his spot by the wall and slid open a port to receive the datachip. Once it was in place, he emitted a brief processing chitter, then turned to aim his holoprojector where they could see it.

"Is that... him?" Leia asked in a tense whisper. Luke nodded, reaching for her hand.

Without the label, he wasn't sure he would have recognized the face in the recording. No older than they were now, probably younger, the slight softness about his features at odds with the strength in his frame and the thin vertical scar near the corner of one eye.

"As a padawan in the field, you must have confidence in your skills, even while your body is still growing and changing." Across more than two decades, Anakin Skywalker spoke in the slightly stilted tone of someone addressing an imaginary audience. "Padawan Tano will demonstrate some ways to adapt the Shien style to your advantage when facing a larger opponent."

He was joined in the image by a slip of a Togruta with enormous blue eyes. The tips of her blunt montrals just reached Anakin's shoulder, and she hardly seemed old enough to be allowed to touch a lightsaber, let alone demonstrate its use.

But she most certainly could use it, twisting and dodging at unexpected angles to match the odd backhand way she held it. Blue and green blades arced through a slow-motion dance, then repeated the pattern at incrementally increasing speed until Luke could barely follow it.

After the final repetition, the pair stepped back and saluted. They held the formal pose for a long moment, then a mischievous half-smile broke Anakin's serious expression, eyebrows raised in challenge. The girl grinned and gave a single nod, and they launched back into motion, matching moves as perfectly in free sparring as they had in the practice forms.

Almost as perfectly. She slid around to his right with a lunging step and a twist that didn't twist quite far enough. Though Anakin's thumb hit the switch in the exact same instant, his weapon still took a split-second to shut down, and the blue plasma skimmed her shoulder. Thrown off balance, she sat down hard with a stifled cry of pain.

"Ahsoka!" He clipped his saber to his belt and knelt to check on the injury. "Hold still, Snips. Let me see."

"I'm _fine_ , master," she protested between clenched teeth. She glared sidelong toward the holorecorder, clearly mortified as only a teenager could be.

"Never mind that," he chided quietly, pulling a small packet from a container on his belt. As he tore it open and gingerly applied the medpatch to her shoulder, he added for the benefit of their unseen audience, "This wasn't how we planned to end this lesson, but it's a good reminder: Even the most skilled of you _will_ make mistakes. Be mindful to avoid it, and be ready when it happens. Right?"

This last was to the girl, who caught herself in mid-eyeroll and managed to put on a semblance of dignity as she accepted a hand up to stand beside him. "Right. Master."

"Keep your focus out there, young ones," Anakin concluded, "and may the Force be with you."

The recording went dark, and Luke stared at the empty air where it had been projected. After a long pause, Artoo burbled a query, and he replied, "No, not yet. How many more files are there?"

The answering beeps indicated seventeen. This might take some time.

He turned to Leia, whose grip on his hand had tightened during the playback. Her expression remained carefully neutral, which concerned him as much as the tangle of feelings he could sense beneath it. She rarely maintained that mask if he was the only one there to see it. When she did, it was to assure herself she was in control.

"Leia," he prompted softly. "Are you okay?"

"Yes." Seeing his skepticism, she insisted, "No, really. I just... The student. I think I know her. Knew her."

Luke didn't know what he'd expected her to say, but that certainly wasn't it. "How?"

"The first Fulcrum agent, early in the Rebellion. I only met her a few times, and of course she was an adult, but... her coloring, her voice. I think that was her."

If she was right... "You didn't know she was a Jedi."

It wasn't a question. Leia had told him about the two she had met a few years before he knew her, a boy their age and his master, both later lost in the uprising on Lothal. She would have mentioned another.

"I didn't really know anything about her. I remember wondering why she was sad, but that was true of so many of my father's friends. It was mostly before I was old enough to know what they were up to."

"Do you know what happened to her?"

"Not really.  I only heard that she'd been killed.  It was eight, maybe nine years ago. The Rebellion had barely established its first planetside base, and operations were still highly compartmentalized." There was a flash of sorrow behind her careful composure as she added, "My father might have known more."

Luke nodded, considering this information along with what they had just seen. "It's so strange, to see..."

"See him like that?" Leia finished for him. "That's an understatement."

"You sure you're okay?"

"Yeah. It's just... like you said. Strange." She squeezed his hand. "I have a meeting in ten minutes. I do want to know what else is on there but... don't feel that you have to wait for me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I usually don't like to edit the content of works after posting, but since I didn't manage to finish this story before the _Rebels_ series finale, I made a small adjustment to this chapter, which previously indicated both Kanan's and Ezra's fates were unknown.


	2. Chapter 2

It was no small effort to keep her focus on the topic at hand, to offer a considered, educated opinion on how to reassure the leaders of a twelve-system chain in the Expansion Region that the Alliance was prepared to defend them from marauding Imperial remnants.

"Prime Minister Kanit of Shili seems to be emerging as the spokesperson," Mon Mothma noted. "She's only been in office a few months, but her people have great confidence in her."

"Any progress on negotiations to get custody of the Imperial governor?" Leia asked.

Mon shook her head. "We've tried to convey the importance of a single structure for war-crimes trials, but they're not having any of it. The responses have been impeccably polite and diplomatic, and very firm."

"'Togruta justice for Togruta suffering' was part of Kanit's campaign platform," Ambassador Jasseel put in. "We can hardly blame them."

"No, we can't," Leia agreed.

The sad smile of a woman she had barely known sprang up in her mind's eye. Easier to think about than a man she didn't know at all. Would never know, had made it clear she didn't need or want to. But Luke did, so badly, and with no one to talk to who knew the truth except her and Han...

"...keep doing what we're doing," Jasseel was saying. "The successes in countering Operation Cinder in particular didn't go unnoticed."

"What about the failures?"

The ambassador blinked at Leia, startled by the bluntness of the question. "Of course we weren't able to stop all the attacks in time. Our intelligence and resources -- "

"Have to be infallible," Leia finished for them, "or as close to it as possible. The people of Shili rose up against Cranden and his officers on their own. Maybe we should pay more attention to acknowledging that the New Republic needs _them_ than convincing them they need us."

Mon considered this. "It's something to keep in mind. So many systems have asked us to show that we're strong enough to protect them, it's easy to forget that some would rather hear the truth that we're stronger _with_ them."

Jasseel nodded slowly; Leia could see them mentally rehearsing new conversations with the people they'd come to know. "If we stress that we need their voices in the Republic _and_ in the war-crimes proceedings... I think Prime Minister Kanit might be willing to discuss that."

"It's far from empty flattery. We _do_ need her people on our side." The sad smile in Leia's memory became a young girl's challenging grin. "Some people would rather be needed than protected."

 

* * *

 

"Leia, do you have a moment?"

"Of course." She waited a few seconds for the room to finish clearing, then turned to Mon. "I should apologize to Ambassador Jasseel. They must think I'm the rudest person alive."

Mon smiled. "They've weathered far worse. But I was a bit surprised. Is something wrong?"

"Only the usual. Six months since Endor, and they're still crawling out of the ductwork."

"It's exhausting," Mon agreed. "When the Pathfinders get back, maybe you and General Solo should carve out some time to yourselves. You've more than earned it."

"Maybe. I'll think about it," Leia promised. "Actually, I had a question for you too."

"Yes?"

"Fulcrum. The original one. You knew her well, didn't you?"

"Fairly well. Why do you ask?"

"The situation on Shili, I guess." It wasn't quite a lie. "It made me wonder if she was from there or from one of the colonies."

Mon thought for a second. "I don't know. And really, I'm not sure how much significance her homeworld held for her."

"Why is that?"

"She kept it quiet, but it doesn't matter now. She was brought up in the Jedi Temple from a very early age, probably before she could remember. They all were in those days, you know."

Leia nodded. "I remember hearing that, yes."

"Ahsoka -- that was her real name -- was expelled from the Order months before the Republic fell. It was a terrible scandal, and made the public that much more willing to believe when the Jedi were branded as traitors."

"What made them expel her?"

"Tarkin." It wasn't just Mon's contemptuous tone that sent a chill up Leia's spine. "The Jedi Temple was bombed, and the evidence -- such as it was -- pointed to Ahsoka. The victims were clone troopers as well as civilian workers. Palpatine's rumor mill made sure the public wouldn't accept the matter being handled internally by the Jedi, but it was Tarkin who demanded that she be expelled to clear the way for a military tribunal."

"And they went along with it?"

Mon shook her head. "They didn't have much choice. Bail, a few others... we were just starting to see how we'd all been used, the Jedi included, but we didn't know by whom. Everyone wanted safety and peace, but nobody could really see a way out. People grasped at any straw. Including trying a minor for treason, with the death penalty very much on the table."

"But that didn't happen."

"Not to Ahsoka. The real culprit was brought forward and confessed, though that was never mentioned in the full Senate, let alone to the public." She scowled in disgust. "What mattered was that a young Jedi had turned against the Republic and been executed for her terrible crimes. There was no room in the popular narrative for two entirely different girls."

Leia shared her disgust, but she knew how easy it was for most people to swallow a tidy story that didn't bear too much scrutiny. "But surely the Jedi knew. If she was exonerated, why didn't they take her back?"

"I don't know; she didn't like to talk about it." Mon looked thoughtful for a moment. "I wondered sometimes if perhaps she didn't take _them_ back. Either way, she always said she was no longer a Jedi."


	3. Chapter 3

Luke turned the datachip over and over in his hand. A cursory look through the remaining files had revealed mission reports, supply requisitions, strategy outlines. The mundane details of command, of interest to the military thinkers among the Alliance leadership and maybe to historians, but nothing else to surprise and unsettle the children of the man who had written or recorded them.

One recording was enough for that.

He had encountered the word "padawan" before, used more or less interchangeably with "apprentice." A single student would be matched with a Jedi for the final phase of their training, to gain real-world knowledge and experience under close supervision. It was considered one of the most powerful bonds in the lives of both teacher and student.

Perhaps with his own teachers in mind, he had imagined this responsibility to be reserved for seasoned masters. Then again, that was equally true of his impression of generals. From what Luke had learned of the Clone Wars, his father had been far from the only improbably young person to hold that rank.

That Anakin's reports sometimes referred to his apprentice as  _ Commander _ Tano was a little more startling, especially accompanied by the image in the training holo. Still, if Luke had ever had any doubts about how formidable a meter and a half of teenage girl could be, they had been thoroughly dispelled the day he met Leia.

He had rewatched the training session four times, riveted more by the normalcy than by the impressive skill on display. Other than a faint spark of light within darkness and a fleeting handful of minutes with a dying man, all he knew of his father was a collection of stories. Most were cautionary, some were larger than life, all were vague.

None spoke of a young teacher, of silly nicknames or careful attention to small hurts.

Ben and Yoda must have known that man, but they came to him so rarely, and their words seemed more opaque every time. He didn't think it was deliberate; it was obvious that the universe looked very different from the other side of death, and things were bound to get lost in translation. None of which made it any less frustrating to be on the "crude matter" end of the conversation.

Anakin himself had not appeared since Endor. Luke gathered that even that had been no small accomplishment.

Leia's presence jogged him out of his musings a few seconds before she knocked. Her surface composure was more secure, betraying almost nothing of the conflicting currents so evident beneath it a few hours before. He didn't understand how she did that, and wasn't sure whether he should be envious or worried, though he couldn't help being a bit of both.

"Come in." He set the datachip aside on a table and slid over to make room on the small sofa.

She accepted the invitation, pulling her feet up under her and turning sideways toward him with a rueful little smile. "So, I didn't even think to ask. How are  _ you _ doing?"

"I'm..." He gestured vaguely with one hand; the right word wasn't in it. "What do you call it when something isn't really surprising if you think about it, but you never have before?"

"You'd have to ask Threepio. I'm sure one of those six million forms of communication has a word for it."

"Probably something I'd never be able to pronounce," Luke agreed. "But anyway, that. And sad. And curious."

"I might be able to help with that last one. A little bit, at least." At his questioning look, Leia continued, "I had a talk with Mon Mothma after the committee meeting. The Fulcrum I knew was Ahsoka Tano."

She related what she had learned, about a girl who had left the Jedi Order under a cloud and a woman who had helped to link a patchwork of scrappy insurgent groups and eventually stitch them into the Rebel Alliance.

"From what Mon remembers hearing, she became pretty close friends with the Jedi from the Spectre cell."

"The ones you met when you ran that 'stolen ship' subterfuge on Lothal? Ezra Bridger and Kanan Jarrus."

"Yes. The three of them went on a recon mission to some mysterious ancient site. Whatever they were after..." Leia hesitated, just long enough for him to guess what was coming next. "Apparently Vader wanted it too."

Luke closed his eyes, giving his stomach a moment to unknot itself. "He killed her."

"I'm sorry." She was, of course she was, and she shouldn't have to be.

"It's okay." He opened his eyes to find her raising skeptical eyebrows at him. "You know what I mean. Nothing about that is  _ okay _ , but..."

"But it's not exactly unexpected," she ventured.

"No. I watched him strike Ben down, without hesitation. Like he was a stranger."

"We all did."

He wanted to put an arm around her and pull her close, but something about the way she was sitting, turned squarely toward him but bolstered against the back and arm of the sofa, said she needed that little bit of space. It can't have been any easier for her to hear, no matter how unsurprising.

Instead, he settled for resting his arm on the back of the sofa, within reach if she chose to shift. "One thing I'm sure of: I'm glad I didn't know all this six months ago."

"What do you mean?"

"I knew he hunted down the Jedi. I knew some of them must have been his friends once, but to actually  _ see _ ... If she couldn't get through to him, I don't think I would have believed I could."

"You don't know that she tried," Leia pointed out. "What makes you think she even knew who he really was?"

Luke nodded acknowledgment of the point. "You're right. As far as we know, no one in the Alliance ever has, except us."

"I hope she never did."

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask why, but of course he knew, should know better than anyone. It seemed so strangely long ago now, that moment when all the lies shattered before one deafening truth, when no denial could be long or loud enough to turn it away. When he could not have begun to guess where it would all lead.

Ben's "certain point of view" had been a poor defense for his wounded, weary soul. What defense could Ahsoka have had? If her fate had been to die at those hands, ignorance was the kindest wish they could offer.

"Do you wish I hadn't told you?"

"Sometimes," Leia admitted. He hadn't expected it quite so promptly. "I can't deny I've thought it would make my life easier."

"Of course."

She reached up and put her hand over his on the back of the sofa. "But it wouldn't. Not really. There would still be something hanging there. I'd know it, but I wouldn't know what or why."

He had to smile at that. "You'd hate it."

"I  _ did _ hate it!" she corrected. "You weren't fooling anyone, you know, pretending you were only worried about Han. If you'd said something then, when it was just you, before they bothered to tell you the rest..."

"That  _ would _ have been easier."

"Probably. Yes. I don't know. But all at once..." She shook her head. "I did need to know. Not in case you didn't make it back, but because... I needed to know. And because you're alone with too many things as it is."

"Thank you. And I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"Waiting too long? Not waiting long enough?"

"What, like there was a right time? That was never going to happen. You did the best you could."

"I was afraid, you know. After Bespin. I think I knew... if I said it out loud, I'd know it was true. And I was afraid of what you'd think."

"Of what? Of you? Luke. You can't have thought I would judge  _ you _ for it."

"I didn't think. I feared. I knew better, but I imagined the look on your face, and I just... couldn't."

"Until you thought you might be out of time."

"Yes. So, I'm sorry."

"All right. You're forgiven." She did move closer then, tucking her feet in the other direction and angling to lean against his side. "Wherever we came from, we decide who we are. Nobody else."

"Nobody else," Luke agreed.


	4. Chapter 4

It felt like she had been trying to read this inscription forever. Every time she thought she was making headway, the letters under her fingers would writhe and shift, and she would look back up at the top to find something completely different from what she was sure she had deciphered.

What was she even looking for?  _ To defeat your enemy, you have to understand them _ .

"There is only one way to understand us, Lady Tano," the shadows in one corner said. "You know this. You have always known."

"This game again?" she muttered to the ruins around her. "You're getting predictable."

"And you're getting tired," another voice singsonged in Barriss' accent. "How long has it been, Ahsoka? How long since they left you for dead?"

She didn't know, didn't want to know. What did it matter? She didn't know how many times she had stumbled on a cache of supplies down some corridor she had never seen before. Each had appeared just as she ran critically low. Each had held out, and then dashed, the hope that it might be a way out of the temple.

This time, though, the food -- if long-expired ration bars counted as food -- had run out entirely, long enough ago that she didn't feel hungry anymore. She suspected she was spending more time in restless sleep than awake, though that distinction was as blurred as all the others. Only the sharp glinting edge of the Dark Side remained clear. It would play a thousand tricks to get her to give herself to it, but it wanted her to see it when she did.

"Chains are the easy part," sniveled a voice near her knees. "It's what goes on in  _ here _ that's hard."

Ahsoka stared for a moment at the little grey creature tapping its forehead with a fingertip, then kicked it in its insufferable face.

To her mild surprise, the kick connected, knocking it back against the wall. Its laughter shifted with its shape until the Son loomed over her. "Well. That was rude. What happened to that nice little girl who was so sure her master would come for her?"

"He did come for me."

"Yes. I suppose he always did. Though... that didn't work out so well the last time, did it?"

She didn't snap  _ Shut up!  _ Didn't lash out with her bare fists. No matter how the anger churned in the pit of her stomach, she didn't have the energy for fighting with ghosts.

"You could," the shadows whispered in chorus, absorbing the Son's gaunt figure as they expanded to fill the corridor. "You could have all the strength you need and more. The temple is broken, but the power remains. Claim it. Leave this place. Crush your enemies."

"To defeat your enemy, you have to understand them."

She spun toward the new voice and caught a fleeting glimpse of orange clothing and blue-black hair disappearing around the corner. "Ezra?"

Oh, no, no, no, it couldn't be. It had to be another phantom. They should never have brought him here, gifted generous  _ trusting _ boy, for all his pride in his street smarts. He couldn't be here. This place would eat him alive.

Shadow fingers stretched after her as she followed him, leaning on the wall all the way. The Barriss-voice was right; she was so tired.

"Too late," the voices said. "You locked him out, but he took the key. He is part of us."

"No!"

Ezra had escaped, she had seen it. In another life, when she was sure of who she was, when she was strong enough to protect him from --

She turned the corner, and all the air went out of her before she even understood what she was seeing. Black and hard and cold as the Dark Side itself, designed as much to inspire terror as to sustain the broken body inside.

The voices crowded behind her --  _ "failed them, failed them all" -- "left you for dead" -- "your destiny, you know it, you've always known" _ \-- but all she heard was the  _ hiss-whoosh _ of the thing her master had become.

"You  _ dare _ !"

That  _ voice _ , the lurid red lightsaber, the fury and hatred spilling over into every molecule around him until she couldn't even breathe without taking it in. Could hardly get a breath at all.

A wave of vertigo pushed her to the floor. She couldn't face him. Not again. Not unarmed, starving, exhausted.

"You are  _ nothing _ ." The lightsaber hummed somewhere near her head, the contemptuous words flung over and past her. "This apprentice will not rekindle your power, feeble shadows. She is  _ mine _ ."

The whispers seemed to confer among themselves, no more intelligible than comlink static, before a few voices emerged from the noise.

"You left her behind. You didn't even look!"

"You gave her to us, Lord Vader."

"Why do you want her now, in her weakness and despair?"

" _ Silence! _ "

Soaked in anger and power, it was no less chilling than the sound manufactured by the suit, yet it was his own voice. When Ahsoka looked up, the figure standing over her was still cloaked in the black of starless space, but the mask was gone. His face was whole, without even the scar that had always seemed as much a part of him as his smile. Whole, and beautiful, and merciless.

"You are nothing," he growled again, and the shadows retreated. "The time of the Sith is done. I am the last."

This was worse than the thing in the mask. She shrank into herself against the wall, nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound of the lightsaber shutting off.

"Ahsoka." He sounded so close she should have felt his breath, but there was nothing. "I'm sorry. That was... That kind of power is all it knows. I'm so sorry."

Heart still pounding, she peered over her knees into the face almost level with hers. Anakin's face, scar and all, just as she remembered it. He was edged in a faint blue-white glow, as if a light were shining on his back from somewhere out of sight and... could she see  _ through _ him?

"What are you?" It came out barely more than a squeak.

"That's... too hard to explain right now." Anakin reached for her shoulders, the gesture achingly familiar, but stopped centimeters away. He pulled his hands back awkwardly, giving them a frustrated frown before dropping them in his lap. "But it's not your imagination, or the temple tormenting you. I'm here."

She shook her head. "How can I believe that?"

"Search your feelings. You know."

"I can't. I tried at first, but it always..." She trailed off, glancing in the direction where the shadows seemed to have been chased away. 

"You can. The Force is still with you. Relax."

On her guard for so long, she thought she had forgotten what the word meant, but part of her still knew, still responded to the voice she had trusted to guide her through countless lessons and dangers. She let her eyes close, felt her shoulders loosen and her breath fall into the calm of...

There. A shining thread, slender but unbreakable, piercing the temple's oppressive darkness. Connecting her to all the life beyond it, carrying a steady trickle of light, of strength, into the very center of her. It had been there all along.

Fear flowed out of her with each breath. In its place, warmth and reassurance poured in through a bond she had thought long severed. Stretching out disused senses, she reached across it, touching sorrow and regret and pride and love.

He was telling the truth.

"I can hold it off for now," Anakin was saying. She opened her eyes, but couldn't quite focus on him. "You need real rest."

"Okay." A hundred questions hung just out of reach, in the fog of fatigue. Later.

"Probably better if you lie down." Once, the touch of amusement in his voice would have prompted a comeback, or at least a pointed look.

As it was, all she managed was a mumbled "Prob'ly."

She curled up on her side, and the darkness that claimed her was only sleep.


	5. Chapter 5

All his young life in the desert, looking up at the stars and longing to soar among them, Luke had never imagined them like this.

There was no ship between him and the silent points of light. They shimmered across a void with no visible planetary systems, just misty nebulae. He could neither see nor sense any life form, yet everything around him was the Force, so pure and pervasive it took his breath away.

Exactly  _ what  _ he was breathing, where he was, and how he was here, were questions for another moment.

Near the left-hand edge of his field of vision, one of the patches of mist grew thicker, coalescing into a familiar green form seated on a log. "Master Yoda!"

Another voice exclaimed the name in unison with him, a young voice. He could see a ring of light suspended in the void, a human figure sitting on his heels on an invisible surface in its circumference. It was a boy in his early teens with shaggy black hair, dressed in worn and haphazardly mended orange and brown.

Though they were only a few meters away, neither showed any awareness of Luke's presence. Their conversation played out like any other, but something told him it was already complete, that the words he heard were immutable.

The Force was showing him something in the past. Why?

"You must know a way to defeat Vader and his Inquisitors," the boy said.

Not too distant a past, then. Was this the Jedi apprentice Leia had met on Lothal? He matched the basic description she had given to the teams tasked with finding and liberating the darkest Imperial prisons.

Grief and regret weighted Yoda's voice as he told Ezra -- if that was who it was -- that the Jedi Order had been consumed by the Dark Side through their involvement in the Clone Wars. Luke was stunned by the bluntness of the admission, by the unmistakable  _ I  _  and  _ we _ .

The warnings about fear and anger, about destroying the very thing one wished to save, all rang as familiar as the little master's gravelly tone. But the suggestion that it was more than the catastrophic betrayal of one man, that the Jedi, in their arrogance, had participated in their own destruction...

"But Master Yoda, if we don't fight back," the boy asked, exasperated, "how are we supposed to win?"

"Win?" Yoda echoed. "Win. How Jedi  _ choose _ to win, the question is."

"We already chose! We're going to fight!"

Yoda sighed, ears drooping, and oh, how Luke knew that expression of resigned disappointment when he looked back up. "Find Malachor."

 

* * *

 

"Malachor," Leia repeated thoughtfully

"Have you heard of it?" Luke asked as she handed him a mug of caf. "Thank you."

Taking a sip from her own mug, she gave him an amused look over it. "You're welcome. I figured you could use it. You look like you came this close to putting your shirt on inside-out."

He glanced down at his clothes. "Just luck, to be honest. I woke up, and all I could think was that I had to tell you right away."

"Well, I've only ever heard 'Malachor' as an expression. An expletive, really."

"Not exactly encouraging." The hot drink and his sister's presence both helped to order his racing thoughts. "The vision... it couldn't have been a real place, not in any physical sense, but the conversation was real enough."

"You think Yoda knew about Ezra, and found a way to communicate with him?"

"He said he'd been watching me all my life. It only makes sense that he was aware of other kids too, especially one who was already training. What's funny?" he asked when Leia gave a small laugh.

"I don't know why I thought of it just now, but... Ezra, disarming a couple stormtroopers from a distance. He  _ did _ succeed in impressing me, but the blaster that bounced off his head undermined it just a little bit."

"I'll bet." Luke tried not to laugh at the mental image -- at a boy he had never met, who very likely hadn't made it to adulthood -- but it was too easy to relate to the predicament. "So... a place nobody goes, where both Jedi and Sith would seek something ancient. How might its name be remembered?"

Leia nodded, considering. "As an expression. Maybe a curse."

"Fitting, if it's where they lost Ahsoka."

"Okay. Say that's the case -- and it's more logical than what you usually seem to get from these things -- what does that mean to  _ us _ ?"

Luke thought about that for a moment, then confessed, "I don't know. It just feels important that we know. Both of us."

"Fair enough. So what do we do with that knowledge? Mon doesn't know what they were after on that mission, or whether they got it or Vader did. But presumably one party or the other did take it."

"So if the Force is telling me to go there, it's not for the same reason."

"Right."

Luke scrubbed a hand over his face. "You know, all I ever wanted was to get away from Tatooine, but at least there I always knew what was expected of me and how to do it."

"Those days are behind all of us," Leia agreed with a rueful smile. "It seems to me we start by finding out if it's even a real place, and if so, where it is. If nothing turns up, there's no point in worrying about whether you're supposed to go there and why."

"And if something does?"

"One thing at a time. I would swear  _ somebody _ told me patience is important for Jedi."


	6. Chapter 6

The floor was cold stone, but Ahsoka was used to that. What she wasn't used to was feeling... not warm, but not chilled to the bone. Not safe, but not under siege.

She took her time opening her eyes and sitting up, the familiar aches and stiffness an oddly comforting assurance that she was still real. The corridor seemed to be real too, just silent stone and flat dim light, without a single taunting shadow lurking in the corners.

Amazing how much easier it was to think clearly after some decent sleep.

What had happened, exactly? The dreams in this place had never much cared whether she was asleep or awake, and that accounted for most of it. But the thread of the Force sustaining her... that had felt too clean, too  _ right _ , exactly as she had known it even as a tiny youngling. And she had felt just as certain of...

"Anakin?"

She felt ridiculous. What she had seen was impossible, an illusion conjured by a delirious mind to defend itself as best it could. She should be grateful for the rare stretch of undisturbed sleep and leave it at that.

But now she missed him, as keenly as she had in the early days of scrabbling to build a life and figure out what she was if she wasn't a Jedi. Of wondering every day if he had been right, if she had made a terrible mistake.

_ //Not a mistake _ . _ // _

Faint as it was, it felt as true as before. The corridor remained apparently empty. "You're still here."

_ //Yes _ . _ // _

"I saw you before. Where are you?"

_ //Harder to reach you... you're stronger.// _

Ahsoka shuddered. "That's when I don't feel so suffocated by the Dark Side. Does that mean you're...?"

_ //Maybe... was lost in it for half my life.// _

"Does it help if I want to hear you?"

_ //Can't hurt _ .  _ Obi-Wan and Master Yoda trained for this. I'm making it up as I go.// _

If there was anything more Anakin than that, she didn't know what it was.

"The shadows... They said you didn't look for me."

A long pause, then,  _ //That's true.// _

"I said I wouldn't leave you. I meant it."

_ //I know _ . _ // _

"I remember a flash, and then... Did you think I was dead?"

_ //I couldn't sense you. Be glad of that.// _

"Why?"

_ //The Emperor.//  _ The icy trickle of fear down the back of her neck was not her own.  _ //He would have taken you. Twisted you. Made you a monster like me, or destroyed you trying.// _

Another long pause.

_ //I would have let him.// _

"I don't believe that."

_ //Then you're still more innocent than you fear.// _

He didn't, she noted, say she was wrong.

"I've had a lot of time to think about that fight. You could have killed me. More than once."

_ //It wasn't my mission. Don't give me any credit for that.// _

"But you're here now. Well, sort of. What's changed?"

_ //Everything.// _

"I don't understand."

_ //I wanted to kill you. I wanted to own you. I wanted to punish you for leaving. I wanted to forget I ever knew you.// _

Well. That cleared things right up. "What do you want now?"

_ //To keep you safe.//  _

"A little late for that, I'm afraid."

_ //Why did you come here, Ahsoka? How did you learn of the holocron?// _

She frowned, the question setting off alarms though she still sensed only good intent. "Why do you ask?"

_ //Good. Keep your defenses up.//  _ He didn't seem bothered by her lack of an answer.  _ //The temple still sees me as Sith, but that won't hold it back for much longer.// _

"Still? Does that mean you're not anymore?" When there was no response, she prompted, "Anakin? It's a simple question."

_ //No.// _

"No... what? No, you're not, or no, that's not what you mean?"

_ //No. It's not a simple question.// _

"They never are," she agreed with a sigh.

_ //I won't leave you.// _ She had to smile at the echo of her own words.  _ //Even when you can't hear me, I will be with you. You will be free of this place. I promise.// _

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

"It's a real place. Or at least it used to be."

"Used to be?" Leia repeated, picking up the datapad Luke set on her desk. An excerpt from the Imperial command handbook, it described the use of a gravity-powered superweapon near the end of the Mandalorian Wars. "Luke, this was four thousand years ago! Half of this information is theoretical at best."

"I know." He took a deep breath, and she knew that serious look on his face. "But the last Jedi in the Rebellion believed it was important to go there."

"And one of them never came back."

"I know that too. But that knowledge has come to our attention, has been  _ meant _ for us to learn. I have to find out why."

Leia shook her head. There wouldn't be any talking him out of this, she could already tell, but that didn't mean she couldn't talk sense. "You must know you're not going to like what you find."

"I didn't like a lot of things I've had to learn in the last few years," he replied. "That didn't make them any less necessary."

"I don't know. Seems like a pretty big risk for a vague objective."

"Not necessarily. The last mission ran into trouble with Vader, not the planet itself." Acknowledging the look she shot him, he amended, "As far as we know."

"Which, as previously established, isn't very far."

"That's exactly why I have to go."

"Luke..."

"You  _ knew _ Ahsoka. Don't you want to find out what happened to her?"

The look in his eyes said he immediately knew he'd made a mistake, that his mouth had gotten ahead of his brain. It didn't keep her stomach from dropping like a stone.

"We know what happened to her," she said flatly.

He tried to cover it, but he actually flinched. "I'm sorry. That was out of line."

"Yes, it was." Leia raised her chin, unwilling to let him off the hook just yet. "The Chorlian sector is about as lawless as it gets, and it's not a short trip. You need to  _ think _ about this. You have enough on your plate as it is."

"I just -- " He dropped his gaze, took another deep breath. "You're right. I believe the Force is leading me to something I need in order to rebuild the Jedi, but... you're right. Going off half-charged isn't going to help anything."

"Glad we agree." Letting her tone soften, she went on, "We've gone from finding an old holorecording to considering a trip to a planet that might not even exist anymore, all in less than two days. All I'm saying is you need to actually consider."

"I know. I will." Luke looked back up at her. "I really am sorry. None of this is fair to you."

"Or you."

He answered with the ghost of a shrug.

"Yes, you're forgiven," she conceded at last.

"Thank you." His smile was genuinely relieved.

As if she'd stay mad at him. "Now shoo. I have an oh-so-exciting working dinner to get to."

"Okay. Remember to eat around the working, huh?"

She gave him a crooked smile as she gathered her things. "I'll see what I can do."


	7. Chapter 7

_ Master Yoda. _

Breath.

_ Ben. _

Breath.

_ Please _ .

He was pushing too hard. This wasn't the way, but he couldn't seem to summon the calm he needed.

Maybe he should go for a run. "Clear your mind" always had been an easier proposition when he was too tired to think anyway.

_ Father? _

There was no answer, of course. Luke wondered what his father's voice would be like if there were. It had been enough, on Endor, to see him as he should have been. His heart had still been full of what Anakin had spoken with his last breaths; he hadn't needed to hear more. Not then.

_ I told her, Father. She listened. It doesn't help her. I don't know what will. _

That Death Star had been the last place in the universe he wanted Leia to be, yet he found himself wishing, for the thousandth time, that she could have witnessed what he had. Something had changed, had  _ unlocked _ , something even more fundamental than a father saving his son or a slave defying his master.

It should have belonged to her too. It couldn't feel anything but wrong that she remained on the outside, denied peace by the inadequacy of Luke's words and the depth of her pain. 

Her sense of justice, of righteous outrage, had awed and inspired him from the beginning, and he couldn't argue when it said their father didn't deserve that release. He couldn't deny the logic that, if there had been more man trapped in the machine than anyone knew, that only made Vader more culpable.

Machines followed programming. Men made choices.

He didn't really know if forgiving their father would help her, and he couldn't change the simple truth that she hurt too much to do so.

Truth.  _ Depends on our point of view... What did you mean, Ben? Were you saying the truth itself was changeable, or that the same truth looks different from different angles? _

"Perhaps both."

Luke's eyes flew open. "That shouldn't surprise me."

The apparition of Obi-Wan Kenobi wore a familiar slightly sardonic smile. "It's a wise question, but it's not the one troubling you."

"Not the only one." Ben hadn't spoken to him this plainly in months. Luke took it as a cue to do the same. "Is there something on Malachor that I'm meant to find?"

"Meant by whom?"

"Yoda. The Force. I don't know. Anything but wishful thinking, I guess. Or distracting myself from other hard questions."

"The Jedi were forbidden to set foot on Malachor."

Somehow that didn't surprise him either. "But a few did, and not that long ago."

"Many things were forbidden. The reasons were true from the Order's point of view. Now the truth depends on yours."

That answer raised a dozen questions of its own, but he left it at that for the moment. "My father's apprentice. You knew her, didn't you?"

"Indeed I did. Ahsoka was... idealistic, precocious, impulsive. Rarely showed him proper respect. Anakin adored her." His own fondness for the girl was obvious in his tone.

"And Vader killed her."

"So it appears."

"Appears?"

Ben shook his head. "Malachor is a place of legends. Even the oldest warn that it is permeated by the Dark Side. Ahsoka's fate is shrouded in that darkness."

Luke digested this for a moment. He knew there were limits to Ben's vision and knowledge; it was the price of retaining his individual consciousness within the Force and continuing to speak to his last student. That an entire planet could be so hidden was a sobering thought.

"When Vader left Malachor, he left alone," Ben continued. "That much I can see. Only your father can know what passed between them."

"And he's not here to tell me." Luke sighed. "Have you heard from him at all? Or... however it works for you. Can you tell if he's still  _ him _ , the way you are, or...?"

Ben was silent and still for a long moment, long enough that Luke thought he might vanish without answering. It wouldn't be the first time.

Finally, though, he said, "Anakin defied every limit ever placed on him. Even if some took too long and cost far too much. "

There was nothing Luke could say to that; he just nodded.

"He has passed on that trait to his children," Ben went on. "I believe you will see him again."

He did vanish then, in the space of a blink, leaving Luke to sift through his words for anything he hadn't already known.

 

* * *

 

There was a sort of nest in this chamber, as if someone had been living in it some time before. Ahsoka stared at it for what felt like a full minute before recognizing that the someone was her.

The first thing she remembered after the fight with Vader was stumbling in here, head ringing with concussion from that fall down the side of the temple as well as... whatever had happened after. He might not have taken opportunities to kill her outright, but that wasn't the same thing as making it easy on her.

One corner held the pallet she had made from a damaged plastic crate, where she had curled up in a tattered cloak she didn't remember finding and waited to either feel better or die.

At the time, she hadn't really cared which.

Only later, when she had woken up with her head throbbing at a manageable level and her stomach growling like an enraged akul, had her survival instincts kicked in. She had been running almost entirely on those instincts ever since -- however long that was -- sprinkled with attempts to glean the knowledge they had come here to find.

Mostly, though, the knowledge she sought was how to get out of this tumbledown trap, and that continued to elude her.

She had all but forgotten that she used to come back to this chamber to collect the oddities she had found, and to sleep when she felt like it was time. One day it had just disappeared, and she had walked in circles for hours before collapsing in an exhausted heap on the floor. After a few failed attempts to find her way back, she had given up, and sleeping wherever she happened to be had become the new routine.

Anakin's voice had faded a few minutes after she woke up in the corridor. She thought she had heard something a few times since then, words she couldn't quite make out, and chose to take it as proof that he was keeping his promise to stay with her.

Even if he wasn't real after all, it meant more to her than the larger promise to free her.  She wasn't sure when she had started assuming there was only one way that was going to happen, but now that she was back where she began, now that she was looking head-on at the thought that this was where she would end, she was remarkably calm about it.

Why had the temple let her find her way back here? Some last bid to convince her that a life bound to the ways of the Sith was the only path remaining? Or maybe it had simply given up and would let her die in peace.

Somehow that second one didn't seem terribly likely.

Sorting through the little pile of artifacts next to the pallet -- a few fragments of writing on what had probably been pieces of walls, an apparently intact but inert lightsaber, assorted enigmatic bits of technology -- she found her long-lost stash of food and water. Two cylindrical canteens, each mostly full, and five ration bars.

With some effort of will, she restricted herself for the moment to a few swallows of tepid, slightly metallic water. It would be dangerously easy to throw her body too abruptly out of the false balance of starvation mode. Restraint with the ration bar was easier; it was still artificially chewy in its sealed packet, but the stale taste made it impossible to do more than nibble.

_ //Why did you come here?// _ It was still faint, but the first thing she had heard clearly in hours.

"Looking for a way to stop the Inquisitors. To stop you." Ahsoka chewed thoughtfully. "We didn't know about the holocron until Maul used Ezra to retrieve it. Sounds like we're about the only ones who didn't."

_ //Dangerous.// _

"So was having you out there hunting us. Hunting children."

_ //The children... That was never what I wanted.// _

"But it's what you chose."

_ //Yes. My greatest shame.// _

She laughed shortly. "Well, then, that makes it all better."

_ //No.// _ The simplicity of it was startling.

Regretting her sarcasm, she said quietly, "Nothing can do that. You know that, right?"

_ //I know.// _

"And you did choose, didn't you? You knew what you were doing."

_ //I thought it was the only...// _ He left the thought unfinished.  _ //Yes. I chose.// _

She took a few more sips of water, then sealed the canteen. "But we all did, in a way, didn't we? The Jedi. The Republic. He had us all fooled."

_ //Don't say 'we.' That fault lies with the adults who failed you. You made the wisest choice you could.// _

"Leaving, you mean? Honestly, it didn't feel very wise. It just hurt less than staying."

_ //I don't believe that. I don't think you do either.// _

"Maybe." She drew the old cloak around her. It didn't do much to dispel the cold, but it was comforting anyway. "I had a vision, before we came here. That was how I knew about you. Or... when I admitted it to myself."

There was something expectant about the silence; she could almost see the expression that went with it.

"I could sense you behind me, like you were really there, but I was afraid to look. You said I abandoned you. Failed you."

_ //I believed that for a long time. Please tell me you didn't.// _

"I doubted," she admitted. "Maybe I  _ was _ selfish. Maybe I  _ should _ have been there when you needed me."

_ //Then you would have paid for my mistakes that much sooner.//  _ There was something like a sigh.  _ //Those who were there... I couldn't see them clearly. They wanted to help, but I wouldn't let them in. Master Yoda. Obi-Wan.// _

"Padmé?"

_ //I said it was all for her. I told myself that, even as I hurt her.//  _ More lightly, he asked,  _ //When did you know?// _

The burst of laughter was probably more than the situation called for, but it felt good. "Somewhere around the third time you vanished overnight on Coruscant and nobody could raise you on your comlink. I may have been a naïve kid, but I wasn't blind."

_ //No, you weren't.// _ The smile in his voice was more subdued, but it was there.  _ //I never wanted to put you in that position. I'm sorry.// _

"I'm not. I mean, yes, it was hard, pretending everything was the way the Code said it should be. But nothing else out there was what I was taught to expect either."

_ //War is no place for children.// _

"War is no place for anyone," Ahsoka said. "I saw how everything lit up when you were together. When everything else just kept getting worse... I knew that couldn't be wrong. It was never even a question."

Her words were getting blurry around the edges, and she pulled the cloak closer around her. The hint of the weight of a hand on her shoulder was almost certainly her imagination.

_ //If you're tired, you should sleep. You need whatever strength you can get. I'll be here.// _

"I know. It's just... one of these times I'm not going to wake up."

_ //Don't talk like that! I won't let that happen.// _

"It's not always up to you."

_ //Ahsoka -- // _

"Anakin. I'm not afraid." The Force only knew why, but she wasn't. "I'm not alone. That's more than I expected."

_ //You are  _ **_not_ ** _ going to die here.// _

"I'll do my best."

At the edge of her vision, she saw shadows gathering and swirling in the corner. She ignored them.


	8. Chapter 8

**8.**

It was cold. At first that was all she knew.

Then things came into focus, and Leia stood on the observation deck of the Death Star, looking out at a green and peaceful Alderaan.

_ No, no, no, no, no... _

This had all happened before, she already felt the loss, and through the rush of fear and anguish she thought,  _ How many see the new artificial moon? How many guess it means nothing good? None of them can possibly know it's the end of our whole world. How many have no idea anything unusual is happening at all? _

Tarkin turned to her with that icy reptilian almost-smile, but it was the looming form behind her, the owner of the hands clamped on her shoulders, who spoke.

"You  _ will _ make mistakes." It rumbled from the speaker built into his suit, reaching her by bone conduction as much as through the air. "Be ready."

Leia pushed defiance past the cold dread clutching her chest. "You don't get to lecture me! You don't even recognize me as your flesh and blood. Why should I?"

Before he could answer, a flash of destructive energy lit up the viewport. Vader spun around and pulled her with him, bending to shield her with his own dark bulk as the whole room flared blinding white.

She stood alone, blinking spots from her vision, at the edge of Cloud City's industrial carbon-freezing pit.

Footsteps from the corridor echoed through the deserted room, bouncing at weird angles off the machinery. She dashed to the door in time to see the gruesome block on its repulsorlift sled disappear around the corner, the bounty hunter close behind. The corridor stretched in front of her as she ran for all she was worth, until she finally made it to the corner, only to find nobody there.

Looking back the way she had come, she gasped to see Luke, lightsaber in hand, stepping warily into the room she had just left.

"Luke, don't!" The distance all but vanished on the way back. "It's a trap!"

No sooner had she barreled back through the door than she pulled herself up short, gaping at what she saw.

The room, the door, Cloud City itself were gone. Through smoke and ash choking the air, it took several seconds to recognize the ruin of the royal palace of Alderaan. One wing was leveled completely, leaving the courtyard where she stood, where she had spent countless hours playing as a child, exposed to the wider devastation beyond. The smoke was clearing, revealing a barren landscape without a blade of green anywhere, only blasted earth and stone, littered with the dead.

"Leia?"

The voice was a painful creak, and she whirled to find Luke, pale and shocky, cauterized wrist held close to his chest. She rushed over and slung his good arm across her shoulders, her other arm around his waist, just barely catching him before he toppled over.

"Come on," she urged. Somehow, between them, they managed to keep his feet under him. Leia tried not to think about what would happen if that changed. "We have to find... somewhere."

"There is nowhere to go." Vader stepped out of a cloud of smoke a few meters in front of them, eddies swirling from his cape. "You cannot hide forever."

Before she could form a response, another voice came from behind him, clear and young and laden with horror. "Master? What have you done?"

He turned, shifting enough that Leia could see her. Even smaller than herself, child's face full of grief and grim determination, child's body braced to fight.

"No!" Leia shouted as Vader advanced on the newcomer. "He'll kill you!  _ Run _ !"

Ahsoka gave no indication that she had heard. She moved almost impossibly fast, her lightsaber glowing pure white, blurring step by step into the graceful grown woman Leia remembered.

It didn't save her.

Vader anticipated every move with contemptuous ease, driving her inexorably back, toward Leia and --

Luke! He had been leaning on her just now, she was sure of it, but somehow she'd lost him. Frantically she looked in every direction, but there was no sign of him. She tripped on something and went sprawling, bit back a scream as she fell on top of the corpse of a palace guard, his dark eyes open and filming over.

Just as she scrambled up, another body landed on the cracked paving stones nearby. The lightsaber rolled from one limp orange hand and came to rest at Leia's feet.

She grabbed it without thinking, without questioning how easily she found her grip and how right it felt in her hand. When she looked up again, Vader stood several meters in front of her, his own weapon pointed down near his side.

For a long moment he just looked at her, then shut down his saber and gestured with it at the desolation around them. "This is my legacy. All that I have is yours."

"I don't care what it is," Leia spat. "I want  _ nothing _ from you."

"Come, Princess." He held out his hand. "Both your mothers were queens. It is time you claimed your rightful place."

"My place is with those who fight tyranny. To my last breath."

"You cannot escape the burden of ruling, though you inherit only an empire of death."

Her answer was wordless and primal, torn from the darkest corner of her soul, and she rushed at him headlong, igniting the white lightsaber as she moved.

By the time she reached him, he was on his knees, head bowed beneath a hooded cloak, gloved hands spread empty in his lap. She stood over him, fury roaring in her ears, urging her to strike, but some other instinct stayed her hand.

Blade still poised between them, she reached with her other hand to fling back the hood. There was so much of Luke in the face that looked up at her, and something of herself too, but most of all something lost and broken and utterly without hope.

"Why?" she all but screamed, squarely into his face. "What can make a person turn into  _ that _ ? How does that happen?  _ How? _ "

He said nothing, just bowed his head again. 

Leia gripped the saber with both hands, pivoting them together the way Luke had begun to show her, and raised it above her head. Ragged breaths chased each other in and out. She couldn't move, couldn't do anything but stare at the pathetic figure waiting for a blow that didn't come, until her arms ached and her lungs burned. Until her own knees buckled and she threw the weapon aside.

They were all gone -- Vader, Luke, even Ahsoka and the fallen innocents. She was alone in the silent ruins, queen of nothing.

"Leia." Luke's voice sounded faint and distant, but she felt his breath against her ear. "Leia, can you hear me? You're safe. You're in your own bed. Let it go."

The desolate landscape faded, and she could feel the mattress and rumpled covers under her knees and her brother's hand warm on her back. "Okay. I'm okay."

"Hi." The little word carried a rush of relief mixed with lingering concern.

He was a barely-discernible outline in the dark, and she felt more than saw the small gesture toward the environmental controls, turning on enough light to restore a sense of normalcy and solidity to the room without too sudden a glare. Luke watched her face carefully for a moment while she got her breathing under control and the warmth of his hand between her shoulder blades began to melt the painful tension there.

"That's a different look," she chuckled ruefully.

Confusion flitted across his face, then he looked down at his pajamas and smiled when she smoothed down the most awkward bit of his rumpled hair. "What? I am a very serious Jedi Knight. Can't you tell?"

"Yes, I'm sure that's exactly what anyone coming back to their quarters from the late shift thought." Leia grimaced. "Unless they were too busy wondering what the screaming was about."

Shaking his head, Luke assured her, "I didn't see anybody. And there was no screaming to hear. Not out loud."

"I woke you up."

"It's happened a few times," he said. "I'm pretty sure I've done it to you too. At least once before we knew why."

She thought about it a second. "I think you're right. You never said anything."

"I probably should have, but... dreams are so personal, and it's not like it's something you can control. This time I heard you calling my name. I was halfway here before I was really awake."

"Sorry."

He shook his head again. "Don't be. Please. I didn't get much, but I could tell this one was bad."

"Pretty bad," she admitted reluctantly.

"And with Han still out on -- " Something in her expression, or maybe the Force, must have given away her annoyance with herself, because he interrupted his own thought. "Leia. You are the strongest person I've ever known. I have no doubt you could handle everything all on your own if you had to. But you don't."

"I know." The smile she offered wasn't exactly her best. It would have to do. She shifted to sit cross-legged, facing him. "Speaking of all on your own, what's this I hear about you checking into ship availability?"

"That didn't take long." Mercifully, he didn't call her on the abrupt change of subject. "I was just checking."

"Uh-huh." She sighed. "This is going to drive you crazy if you don't go, isn't it?"

Wincing a little, Luke said, "It feels more urgent by the hour. I can't explain why."

"Well, maybe it'll be clear when we get there." At his startled look, she went on, "What? If you think I'm going to let you take off to parts mostly unknown by yourself, you're already crazy."

"Have been for years, or so I'm told."

"This is different."

"Not really."

"Well, it's time to break the habit," she retorted. "You keep saying this concerns me too. Fine. You go to Malachor, I go with you. That's the deal."

He looked like he wanted to argue, but he knew better. Instead he simply said, "Thank you."

"Of course." She glanced over at the chrono. "We're both awake now; we might as well start getting ready. With any luck, we'll get back before the Pathfinders do."

Luke's face fell; obviously he hadn't given much thought to how Han would react to all this. "If you'd rather wait -- "

"And watch your head explode? No, thank you." She went over to the environmental controls and turned the lights up to full. "If we're doing this thing, let's get it done."


	9. Chapter 9

Ahsoka stumbled on the step up to the troop shuttle and glanced over her shoulder, hoping nobody had seen. How embarrassing would that be, after the last couple days? She wasn't even lugging a baby Hutt on her back anymore. Once aboard, she leaned gratefully against the hull, closing her eyes.

"Ahsoka, look at me." Master Skywalker frowned. "Are you dizzy? Do you have a headache?"

Why did he have to do this? In front of half a dozen clones, all studiously looking anywhere but at their general as he fussed over her like she was a helpless youngling. "It's nothing, really. I'll be fine."

"That's not what I asked." He pushed back one glove and pinched up a little fold of skin on the back of her hand. It took a second to settle back into place. "You're dehydrated. I told you, the desert takes everything."

She blinked. "Oh."

"Here." He pulled electrolyte tablets from his medkit and dropped them into a bottle of water, then handed her the faintly pink result. "Drink all of this. Not too fast."

"Thank you, master." She meant to take a sip at a time, but once her throat started swallowing it didn't want to stop.

"Whoa, whoa. Take it easy, or your stomach will hate you." He put a hand over hers on the bottle and gently pushed it down. "Ignoring what your body tells you isn't strength, little one. Even when you're not in a position to do much about it, you must be mindful. And never lie to me about it."

The correct response was _Yes, master_ , but she couldn't resist. "Does that mean I can lie about other things?"

"Try it. See how far it gets you." One corner of his mouth quirked up. "So, now that we've established I'm not sending you back... How old _are_ you, anyway?"

"Fourteen. Well, practically. In twenty-seven days."

_//AHSOKA! WAKE UP!//_

“What?” She was...

Not standing up. Not on a shuttle. Not practically fourteen. But pain still squeezed her skull, and she didn't want to move, and... why was the floor still vibrating with the rumble of a ship?

"What's happening?" she tried to say. Her mouth was so dry, her tongue thick and clumsy, and what came out didn't sound like much.

Anakin seemed to understand it anyway. _//It's time. You're getting out of here, but you have to get_ **_up_ ** _!//_

“Okay.” She managed to roll onto her hands and knees and shove herself into a semblance of upright. “Ow.”

_//I know it hurts. I’m sorry. Now walk.//_

“Where’m I going?”

 _//The way you’re already facing. It’s okay if you have to use the wall, just_ **_move_ ** . _//_

The urgency in his words was sinking in, and she forced her feet to start walking. She was pretty sure the shaking of the wall against her hand was real, but it didn’t feel like a ship’s engines anymore. It felt like –

There was a loud _crack_ , and the ceiling ten meters behind her caved in.

Some little reserve of adrenaline hit her groggy brain, and she didn’t need prompting to move faster, joints protesting every step.

_//You’re doing fine. Keep your focus forward. Keep moving.//_

“I’m moving, I’m – wait.” She knew this chamber. “Anakin, I’ve been this way a hundred times. It leads farther in!”

_//Not this time.//_

“That doesn’t make any sense!” He didn’t know what he was talking about, or... “Oh, no. You _are_ a trick, aren’t you? Just another shadow!”

 _//_ _**No!** Please, Snips, listen to me. If you ever trusted me, listen to me now. The only way out is forward.// _

She didn't know if she believed him, didn't know what to believe. Then more fragments of ceiling came crashing down, closer this time, and it didn't matter anymore. She had two choices: Go where he directed, or be crushed right here.

Even a sliver of hope was still hope.

The patterns in the black stone around her lit up red, then fizzled out erratically. The whispers were in close pursuit. _"No Jedi, no Sith, are you anything at all?" -- "He betrayed every trust ever given to him. He betrays yours even now." -- "The only freedom is power. Your friends need never hide again!"_

It wasn't hard to tune them out, not when it took everything she had just to keep moving. The archway ahead of her was already partially blocked, a fallen slab leaning precariously against it to form a cockeyed triangle. Beyond it, only deeper black.

Eight meters. Six. Four and a half.

Another tremor, the most violent yet, knocked her off her feet. A chunk of something bounced off one montral, the deafening _thunk_ amplified in the hollow structure and reverberating through her skull, and she belatedly shielded her head with both arms as more debris rained around her.

"Ahsoka!"

She could see him. That was bad, wasn't it? She couldn't remember why. The whole chamber seemed to tilt crazily, but he stayed stable, and she focused on him as she hauled herself to her feet.

"Come _on_ ! You can do this. Move, move, _move_!"

He held out his hand, staying just out of reach with each step. "Not fair," she mumbled.

"Hey! Ahsoka, stay awake! Look at me!"

Her head was falling forward, the rest of her threatening to follow, and she forced herself to lift her chin, blinking at him. He was in the archway now. A meter and a half, a parsec away. She stepped on a loose stone and pain shot up her calf as she dropped to one knee, just barely stopping herself from landing in a heap again.

There was no time to pause for a breath, and Anakin wasn't about to let her think there was. "Blast it, I trained you to survive, and that is exactly what you're going to do! Now get through this door!"

She dragged herself the last meter on her hands and knees, and knew nothing more.


	10. Chapter 10

Luke held his breath as he set the shuttle down on Malachor's barren surface, as close as he dared to the large jagged hole that revealed just how thin that surface was. 

The ship's scanners had been telling him impossible things since they had entered the system, forcing him to fly entirely on instinct. Artoo's anxious beeps and whistles conveyed his opinion of that with perfect clarity and no need for translation.

Aside from the opening into the hollow space below, the terrain was unnaturally flat stone for kilometers around. The only features were a scattering of oddly shaped, top-heavy obelisks, their concentric arrangement suggesting there had been more in the space that was now collapsed in the center. Luke had chosen the landing site without thinking, sure in his bones that it was the place.

Leia voiced his own thought. "Whatever we're supposed to find here, let's hope it's not buried under a few tons of rock."

Before he could answer, another voice rang in his head.  _ //Luke! Hurry. There isn't much time.// _

Leia gasped and sat rigidly straight, leaving no doubt that she had heard it too. He put a hand over hers, white-knuckled on the side of her seat, and said, "You could stay and keep the ship ready."

"That's Artoo's job," she returned briskly. All cool efficiency, she rose and picked up one of the backpacks at the rear of the cockpit. "I think we're going to need the climbing gear."

"I think you're right." About the gear, and about the no-nonsense attitude. If he could sense a low thrum of agitation beneath it, he also knew it would be locked down tight until they were safely back on base. They could talk about it then, if she allowed it.

The silence outside was a palpable thing, giving the impression that the very air was thick, though they breathed easily enough. Of all the planets Luke had visited, none had felt this truly alien. Something cold and dark pulled at them from beneath the broken surface, just discernible, like being at the edge of a gravity well.

But there was something else...

_ //Be careful,// _ the voice warned unnecessarily. The same voice he had heard in the recordings on his father's datachip.  _ //The whole area is unstable.// _

Caution slowed their steps as they approached the edge, despite Luke's instincts urging him to hurry, hurry, hurry. The dark pull grew more pronounced too, and he could feel Leia's shudder through her determined calm.

Below them lay the ruins of a massive structure of polished black stone. Enough of the base and sloping walls remained to guess at a pyramid shape.

At the edge of the ruins, almost directly below them, there was a spark. Luke thought he had seen it at first, but no, it was only discernible through the Force.

"There's something..." He closed his eyes, reached out for a better sense of the elusive flicker nearly smothered in the dense gloom.

"Luke?"

It couldn't be, could it? "I think there's someone alive down there."

"What?"

_ //Luke, please! Hurry!// _

Leia laid a restraining hand on his arm. "I don't like this."

"I don't either," he admitted, "but this is what we came for. I can feel it. Can't you?"

Reluctantly she nodded and let him go.

Pointing to the nearest obelisk, Luke said, "See if you can anchor a line to that. I should be able to get down safely enough, but I'm not so sure about getting back up. Especially if I'm not alone."

"Be careful." She winced a little at the unintended echo of the ghostly voice, but moved to follow his suggestion.

"I will."

Anywhere else, he would have let the Force guide his steps at the treacherous edge. As sure as he was that it had led him here, though, he found his connection to it dampened, and relied on his physical senses to find to a spot that seemed stable enough to support the jump.

He landed harder than he expected and rolled with the impact, coming to a stop near a fissure revealing another level below, and tried not to think too much about whether these caverns could possibly have formed naturally or why the whole thing hadn't already collapsed.

"Luke!"

It was the same voice, but very definitely not in his head. 

He ran in its direction, scrambled over a pile of debris, and there was his father. The same figure he had seen on Endor, dressed like Ben, the eyes of the young man in the holos looking out of a middle-aged face. Anakin was on his knees, surrounded by rubble and vaguely humanoid sculptures in unsettling poses suggesting strife and defeat.

It took a few seconds to recognize that the shape closest to him was humanoid too, crumpled on the ground and wrapped in threadbare dark cloth that had once been black or brown or maybe red. Anakin's hand seemed to rest lightly on the head, and as he approached Luke could see a bit of dirty white and blue that proved to be the tip of a striped head-tail.

He knelt and carefully turned over the prone figure. Unconscious but, in defiance of all odds, alive. "Ahsoka." he whispered.

"You know her?"

Luke shook his head. "I'd never heard of her until a few days ago. Everyone believes she's dead."

"At my hand." There was no surprise or defensiveness in it, just resignation. "I hesitated. She did the rest."

"How is this possible? It's been more than eight years."

Anakin didn't answer, gaze fixed on his former apprentice with such pride and sorrow that Luke felt like he was intruding until his father turned the same expression to him. "You are everything I dreamed for you and more. You and your sister, and her too. To have seen that is far more than I deserve."

For months Luke had imagined what he would say if his father appeared again, but none of those words would come to mind. Then the ground shook beneath them, sending new bits of debris bouncing from the nearby ruins, and why was there never any time?

Ahsoka was an alarmingly light burden, all too-sharp angles under the cloak. He picked his way around the rubble as carefully as circumstances allowed, trying not to jostle her more than he had to as the tremors continued.

"Luke!" Leia's face appeared at the edge some seven meters above. "Are you okay down..."

She trailed off, staring first at the figure he carried, then with even wider eyes at the one behind him. He started to turn, but Anakin stepped past him, mirroring her shock though he must already have known she was there.

Longing and shame and things Luke couldn't untangle or name rippled through the Force, and his father's image wavered out of existence and back again, all the while murmuring something that didn't quite cross the space between them.

Another tremor struck, the most violent yet, shaking them all out of the suspended moment and forcing Luke into an awkward little dance step just to stay on his feet. "Is the line secure?" he called up to Leia.

"I sure hope so," came the answer.

"It'll have to do. Don't throw it down yet," he added as she held up the coil of rope. "I'm going to lift Ahsoka up to you first."

Leia didn't look happy, but she hardly had any reason to. "Okay."

Closing his eyes, he centered himself, then acknowledged the convulsing planet and its oppressive darkness as facts before setting them aside. The body in his arms was battered and fragile, life glowing within it like banked coals, and he cushioned her as best he could with what power he could gather. Steady, steady...

After a small eternity, she hung level with Leia, who reached to help as, with a final thought, he set Ahsoka on the surface.

"I've got her." Leia's voice shook a little, though her face held only determined focus. "Here comes the line." 

The rope uncoiled its way down to him, and he gave it an experimental tug. It seemed solid enough. He took hold of it to start climbing, then stopped. There was something...

A chill crawled up his spine and skittered over his scalp. Without really meaning to, he looked over his shoulder, then turned toward the ruined structure. Something moving. Something  _ whispering. _ He could almost make it out --

"Luke!" His sister's shout from above seemed oddly muffled. "What are you doing?"

_...enough for... task ahead... cannot teach what you do not know... _

"Go. Now." Anakin stood in his path, holding up a warning hand. "Ahsoka is the only good thing you will find in this place, my son. Take her home."

" _ Luke! _ " The edge in Leia's voice was not quite panic, sharp enough to slice through the dark threads trying to weave into his mind. "Come  _ on _ !"

He spared his father a last wishful look, then scrambled up the rope toward her.

Just as he reached the top, another strong tremor hit, and nearly a meter of the crumbling edge gave way. He clung to the wildly swinging line, watching Leia drag Ahsoka to relative safety, then pulled himself up beside them with a mix of pendulum-swing momentum, the Force, and sheer muscle-straining necessity.

Leia searched his face. "You okay?"

He nodded, not trusting his voice, and gave himself a second or two to breathe. It was all they could afford.

Ahsoka stirred as he picked her up, mumbling something that sounded like "I'm sorry, master" before lapsing into limp stillness. Peering over the edge, Luke caught a glimpse of his father's back, approaching the ruins with a determined set to his shoulders.

Then the ground shook yet again, Leia pushed at him, and they ran.

Artoo twittered frantically at them as they boarded. It was impossible to pick any recognizable signal out of the flurry of sounds, but the gist was clear.

"I know, I know!" Luke settled Ahsoka across a row of seats while Leia secured the hatch. "Make sure the hyperdrive is prepped. I want to be ready to jump the second we're clear."

"I'll rig a way to buckle her in," Leia said. "Get us out of here."

Luke needed no prompting, and the droid rolled after him, pausing for a second to look over their new passenger with a trill of worry.

"Come on, Artoo! Introductions can wait."

Already flipping switches as he threw himself into the pilot's seat, Luke could feel the dark pull from below increasing. He slammed up a barrier of concentration to lock out everything but flying.

There was quite literally not a second to spare. No sooner had they lifted off than a huge crack opened beneath them; a little altitude showed it as part of a network radiating out from the hole he had just climbed out of.

At first a little altitude was all he could get, as gravity readings bounced all over the scale and it was all he could do to keep the ship level. "Hang on back there!" he called to the passenger compartment.

"Thanks a lot! I couldn't tell!"

A sliver of him was was aware of his own smile at the retort. The rest of him was in the ship, in the wild ocean of matter and energy around them, in the push and pull between the two. His hands raced across the controls, making constant adjustments to use all the forces acting on them, as well as the shuttle's own power, to wrest it meter by hard-won meter from the influence of the planet below.

Thrusters at maximum, hull groaning in protest, they escaped the atmosphere, and a few moments later the gravitational anomalies tapered off to almost nominal levels.

Luke took a deep breath and pointed them out of the system. "Artoo, light speed in three, two, one."

He pulled back on the lever, the starlight stretched around them, and they were free.


	11. Chapter 11

It was easy to tell when they entered hyperspace, even though she was seated on the deck facing aft in the passenger compartment. Both hands had a firm grip on one of the seats, bracing the unconscious Togruta laid across it as much as herself. Leia felt the relief before she registered the sudden smoothness of their flight.

The relief was Luke's, not hers. She wasn't sure how she knew that, but she made note of it, then allowed her own reaction to follow suit.

Ahsoka's condition provided a concrete focus; everything else could wait. The ashen pall over the orange of her skin was not just dirt. Hollow cheeks, cracked lips, flattened lekku, the looseness of her worn tunic and leggings, all indicated starvation more than any injury or illness. Leia couldn't rule out invisible injuries like head trauma or cracked ribs, but neither could she diagnose them in the field while the patient was out cold.

An apt phrase, she realized. Togruta normally ran several degrees hotter than most humanoid species, but Ahsoka's hands were like ice and even her forehead seemed cool to the touch. That, Leia could do something about, and if she opened the emergency kit stowed under the aisle seat, pulled out the heated blanket, and activated it a bit more emphatically than was strictly necessary, there was nobody to comment.

Ahsoka seemed to react even before Leia finished tucking the blanket around her, shifting slightly and whimpering something in the liquid vowels and trills of her native language. There was a tube of nutrient gel in the emergency kit; maybe she could be roused enough to get a little of it into her.

Leia slid a hand under her head and lifted it to tuck a rolled-up blanket under it, just enough that her swallow reflex wouldn't be trying to work uphill.

"Ahsoka?" She set a hand on the other woman's shoulder and gave it a slight shake. "I need you to open your mouth, just a little. Can you do that?"

She hadn't intentionally adopted the tone she would use with a frightened child, but that was how it came out. Apparently it did the job; Ahsoka mumbled, "Okay," and followed the instruction.

"Good," Leia encouraged, squeezing a small dollop of gel between teeth and cheek, where it couldn't immediately fall back and choke her.

The white markings on Ahsoka's brow puckered in confusion, then she smiled a little. "Sweet."

"It's mostly sugar," Leia explained. "Some protein. Basic nutrients."

There was no telling how much of that she registered, but she swallowed without incident. "More?"

"Of course." Leia gave her a slightly bigger dollop this time, watching her work it around and swallow twice. "That moisture will help, but it'll be better if you can drink some water. Can you sit up?"

"Think so." She was already trying to do it on her own, and Leia scrambled to put a supporting arm around her shoulders and grab a water bottle at the same time.

Ahsoka's eyes opened uncertainty, then flew wide as they met Leia's, her whole body tensing in panic. "Leia? Oh, no, they'll find you -- "

"No, it's okay." Leia took hold of her shoulders as she moved to get up.

" -- failed you, little one, I'm so sorry -- "

"Shh, Ahsoka, calm down. Fulcrum.  _ Ora _ ." She froze, and Leia heard herself continue, "It's okay. They're gone. I don't have to hide anymore."

Ahsoka stared at her a few seconds longer, then passed out again.

Luke was already there, stepping up from behind her to help. When they had Ahsoka settled back across the seats, he sat on the deck beside Leia. "Ora?"

"I don't know." She could feel him studying her face, though her own gaze was locked on Ahsoka. "I was... I don't know."

"Okay." He cautiously took her hand, and she finally looked over at him, concern and curiosity written across his features. "I'll stay back here for a while. There shouldn't be any issues until it's time to drop out of hyperspace, and Artoo can alert us if there are. Or you can have the cockpit to yourself, if you want, and I'll sit with her."

"No, I'm -- " She was what? She really had no idea what she had been about to say.

Luke just waited, and finally she said, "Yeah. I think I'd like to go up front."

"Okay," he repeated, squeezing her hand before letting it go. "Let me know if you need anything."

"I will."

_ "...you know who her birth parents were?" _

_ "No. There was so much chaos at the end of the Republic." _

_ Leia peeked out between the wooden battlements of her play castle, curious who Papa was lying to. The grown-up words didn't mean much, but the lie buzzed like a jewel-bird's wings at the back of her head. _

_ The lady walking with Papa was... bright. Not just because she was pretty colors. It was like there was extra sunshine on her. _

_ "Good. Safer for her." _

_ Leia was good at hiding -- everybody said so -- but the lady looked right at her. Her eyes got very big for a second, then she smiled and waved. _

_ "Hi. I like your castle." _

_ "Thank you," she answered dutifully. "You're not supposed to see me." _

_ "Leia!" Papa used the voice that meant he wasn't mad, just  _ **_surprised at you!_ ** _ She never could figure out what the surprise was. "That's not polite." _

_ "I'm sorry." She stood up very straight, just like Mama when they had Important Guests. "You can come inside." _

_ Papa laughed. "I don't think -- " _

_ "I would be honored, Princess." _

_ The bright lady bowed, then started up the castle stairs on her hands and knees. She had to duck way down to fit, but a few seconds later her head popped up through the opening on the top level. _

_ "Your anti-grownup security measures are very effective." She was trying not to laugh. It didn't work very well. "I would have looked pretty silly if I got stuck." _

_ Up close, Leia saw that what she had thought was a fancy hat with blue and white stripes was really part of the lady's head. It would have been easy for her to get stuck, but she hadn't, and now she was on the top of the castle, kneeling down so they were the same size.  _ **_Equal_ ** _ , Papa would say. _

_ "Would it hurt?" Leia asked. _

_ "If I got stuck? Maybe a little bit." Touching the top of her head, her guest said, "This part, where it's kind of pointy? Those are called montrals, and they're pretty tough. Want to see?" _

_ She ducked her head, and Leia reached up to touch. It was smooth and hard like Mama's lacquered jewelry box, but warm and alive too. _

_ "Did you ever get stuck?" _

_ "Not yet." She looked up as Leia drew her hand back. "Knowing me, it'll probably happen sometime. The rest of me is all done growing, but these will never stop. Gotta have fun fitting through small spaces while I can." _

_ "What's your name?" _

_ She looked over at Papa, then back at Leia. "That's a secret." _

_ "I can keep secrets." _

_ "I bet you can." She was still smiling and using a happy voice, but she was sad, so sad it made Leia a little sad too. "Tell you what. Why don't you give me a name that's just for us? That can be our secret." _

_ Leia thought about it, then stepped up close. The other stripey parts looked soft, like Miss Ziya's lekku, but they hung close to the sides and back of her new friend's head. She couldn't tell if there were ears underneath, so she just leaned in close to her face and whispered, "Ora?" _

_ "Like the fruit?" she whispered back. "I don't know if I'm that sweet, but sure. I can be Ora." _

_ "They're pretty like you," Leia explained, tracing the white lines on her orange skin. _

_ "Thank you." Ora seemed happy about that, but she was still sad too. Grownups did that a lot. "Okay, my turn. I think your hair is pretty. Is it okay if I touch?" _

_ Leia nodded, and Ora put one hand on her head. For a second the extra sunshine seemed very bright, then the inside of her head felt funny and she saw pictures and colors all mushed together. _

_ She heard Papa's voice and Ora's, very far away. "...shielded other children." -- "...ordinary lives, in out-of-the-way places. Not the Princess of Alderaan." -- "I don't know what else to do." -- "I know. I'll try. Maybe if I can channel her own abilities into it..." _

_ There was a secret, not like Ora's name but a big secret. So secret Leia had to keep it when she didn't even know what it was. She saw a big heavy door and heard Ora saying, "I'm so sorry, little one. Guard it and keep it locked up tight. You're very very strong. I know you can." _

_ Then everything was dark, and it was a few seconds before she figured out it was because her eyes were closed. When she opened them, she was snuggled in Ora's lap. _

_ Papa was right by the castle now, looking up at them. "I think it's time for somebody's nap." _

_ "That's a good idea." _

_ Leia usually argued, because she was four and a  _ **_half_ ** _ and that was too big for naps. But today it sounded good. She looked up at Ora. "Will you read me a story?" _

_ "Sure." Ora's eyes were all shiny, in the "not crying" way. She was still bright pretty colors, but the sunshine on her was just sunshine. _

Artoo burbled a soft inquiry, and Leia swiped impatiently at the saltwater on her cheeks. "Yes, Artoo, I'm fine. Thank you."

She sat back in the pilot's seat, thinking of solid walls and heavy locked doors and how everyone had stared when she returned from the Death Star without giving up a single secret, and watched the underside of the universe streak by.


	12. Chapter 12

Almost as soon as they had broken free of Malachor's gravity, the trickle of the Force through their passenger had increased to a river.  A flare of pain and confusion had told Luke when it lifted her briefly to consciousness, and even now he could feel it flowing into every parched corner of her being.

The confusion swirling around them now was Leia's. The name she had spoken was as much of a surprise to her as it was to Luke, but it was no surprise that she had chosen to regain her balance in what little privacy the small shuttle afforded.

They had taken turns napping on the trip out, but neither had been able to sleep much. Now, with the danger behind them and another twenty hours of travel ahead of them, fatigue was starting to demand its due. Leia had to be feeling it too, making it that much harder to sort out whatever had happened in her head. He wanted to give her the first shift to rest, but the turbulence in the Force around her said that wasn't going to happen for a little while.

He gave her what space he could, though experience had already made it clear they would never be able to shut each other out entirely, even if they wanted to. Not that he could imagine wanting to. Still, not having the option was a little unsettling even to him, let alone to Leia.

There was a flash of an image of Ahsoka, vivid and fascinating to a curious child. A man's dark eyes sparkling with laughter, affection and grief twining together around Leia's heart.

Something she hadn't known she knew, Luke guessed. Jarred loose by Ahsoka's reaction to recognizing her, on top of the chaotic currents of power on Malachor and the shock of hearing and seeing their father.

She wasn't the only one. He felt like a sandstorm had blown through the center of him, scouring him raw.

_ You are everything I dreamed for you and more. _

Hero. Teacher. Traitor. Monster. Ghost. The father built from wheedled stories and childish wishes had been so much simpler.

 

* * *

 

They hadn't planned to return in the wee hours by local time, but it was a happy accident. Luke didn't need to hear more than "Roger that, Princess," to know that the watch officer was burning with curiosity about Leia's orders to have a medical team standing by for a top-secret patient. The fewer people who saw them arrive, the better.

Coming in to land, the first thing he noticed was the  _ Millennium Falcon _ nestled in her accustomed space. He glanced over at Leia, who just shrugged. All things considered, Han beating them home was pretty minor.

Not that Han was likely to agree with that, as the way he stalked across the hangar made clear. Even Chewie was only just keeping up with him.

"Where the  _ hell _ have you two been?" If he kept up that volume, half the base would be out here after all, just to see what the commotion was about.

"Funny you should put it that way."

The weariness in Leia's voice put a stop to whatever else Han was about to say. He still looked worried and aggravated, but the balance shifted sharply toward the former. She kept her arms tightly crossed, and Han brushed a hand down her back to settle near her waist. "Hey, what's going on?"

Before either of them could answer, Chewie gave a bark of surprise and barreled past them to where the medical team was maneuvering a gurney down the shuttle's gangplank. The next sounds that came out of him made no sense to Luke, but Han frowned and asked, "What are you talking about? Who's Ahsoka?"

Luke actually felt his jaw drop. "Chewie, are you saying you know her?"

He managed to pick a few words out of the answering rapid-fire burst of Shyriiwook --  _ hunters, Jedi cubs, rescue _ \-- and even Han looked like he was barely following it.

"So, wait, she was one of those kids? I thought all the Jedi were supposed to be -- "

"Will you keep it down?" Leia hissed. "This is  _ not _ a topic to be discussed with the entire base. Not yet."

Han looked from her to Luke and back again, then repeated with forced deliberation, "What's going on?"

Leia's sigh took the tension in her body down a tiny fraction. She spared a glance for Luke -- they had already discussed how to handle this when Han got back; it was just happening sooner than they had hoped -- and jabbed fingers at Han and Chewie. "You two. With me."

Luke acknowledged Han's look in his direction with a rueful shrug, then turned to follow the medical team. He didn't envy Leia the task of explaining the developments of the last... had it really been just a week?

And now it turned out Chewie, of all people, recognized Ahsoka. That promised to be quite a story of its own.

His own part, for the moment, would be keeping the unexpected arrival under wraps in the medcenter. Mon Mothma would have to be told, and soon, raising more complications. Hopefully she would accept the reasoning -- Leia's idea -- that Ahsoka shouldn't come into contact with anyone she hadn't already seen, not until they knew more about what had happened to her. Until they were sure she hadn't been somehow compromised.

The real reason, the one they couldn't mention, was the possibility that she knew the secret they had so far confined to themselves and Han. That she knew what had become of the man she once called "master."

However awkward the conversation Leia was about to have with Han, it was nothing next to the one that was coming when -- if -- Ahsoka recovered enough to talk.

 

* * *

 

"That's not just an excuse, is it? You do think she could be a security risk."

Leia closed her eyes and settled more securely back against Han, grateful for the dozenth time in less than an hour that Chewie had accepted an abbreviated summary of the Malachor mission -- one that omitted the connection between Skywalker and Vader -- and then left her and Han to themselves. For all she knew, he was making a nuisance of himself in the medcenter instead, but that was Luke's problem.

"As much as I don't want to, we can't ignore the possibility," she admitted. "Obviously whatever she's been through was horrific, but... nobody could survive in that place. Not for eight years."

"I'll take your word for it." He kissed the top of her head. "I've done more than my share of crazy things, but  _ Malachor _ ? If you'd waited for me -- "

"We would have been too late," Leia interrupted. "Luke was right about that. I'm not sorry we went, even if it was... beyond strange."

She couldn't suppress a shiver, even though the room was warm and Han's arms around her were warmer.

"You think it was really... him?" he asked.

"Luke does," she allowed. "I don't pretend to understand why he's so sure, but he is."

"And that's good enough for you?"

"Maybe it should be. I just can't help waiting for the trap to spring. Even if there probably isn't one."

Han chuckled, deep in his chest, vibrating against her head. "See, that just sounds like good sense to me."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome. Of course, if I actually listened to good sense, you never would have seen me again after the Death Star."

"Is it too late to take back that 'thank you'?"

"Yep."

Leia gave him a mostly-pantomimed whack on the arm, then sighed. "I want it all to be what it seems, just as much as Luke does. I really do."

"I know."

"We're not going to know anything until we can talk to her."

"Nope."

"I'm thinking in circles."

"Yep."

"I'm... very tired."

"Yep."

"Are you going to say anything else?"

He kissed the top of her head again. "Nope."

"Okay, okay. I can take a hint."

Han snorted. "I'll believe that when I see it."

"Ha! Made a liar out of you already."

"Excuse me?" He put on his very best wounded tone, and she couldn't help giggling. "I happen to be a very honest man."

"Oh, please," Leia retorted. "I'm prepared to believe in ghosts, but  _ that _ is preposterous."

"Preposterous? I can just see that one on a vocabulary test at Princess School. Pre-POS-terous."

The next whack was a little less pantomimed.

"Ow! At least hit the other arm once in a while, huh?"

"I'll think about it." She sighed again. "I should probably go talk to Mon."

"That's a preposterous idea."

Leia leaned forward at that, just to shoot him a dirty look. "Why?"

"Because it's 0330. Nothing is on fire. Your surprise guest isn't even conscious. It can wait."

"You're right." She leaned back again.

"'Course I am." He tucked a stray wisp of hair behind her ear. "I could come up with a suggestion or two to keep you occupied, but I think the best idea is getting some rest."

"Stay?"

"I got nowhere better to be."


	13. Chapter 13

Ahsoka sat in the anteroom to the Council chamber, doing her very best to demonstrate patience.

Her best wasn't very good. She excelled her peers in most things, but patience had never been one of them. Not at the best of times, and certainly not now.

Right now the closest thing she could manage was dread.

She glanced up at the guard by the door, the surface of his Force presence as blank as the mask he wore. She might as well have been alone in the room, which was probably the point.

When she had imagined getting the attention of the Jedi Council, it had never been like this.

Finally, just when she thought she might explode, the door slid open and the guard stepped aside, gesturing for her to precede him into the chamber. She took a deep breath. Polite. Respectful. Calm.

"...sure this is the right path," Master Plo was saying as she approached the doorway. He had always been on her side, from the day he had brought her to the Temple, and the thought that she had disappointed him brought a sharp pang of guilt.

"Understand her, he will." said Master Yoda. "Guide her he can, to understand herself."

Wondering who "he" was, Ahsoka stepped to the center of the circle and bowed with all the dignity she could manage. "Masters."

Master Windu gave her a long, measuring look before saying, "It seems you've had a busy day, young one."

She gulped. "I'm so sorry, master. I really thought the trellis would hold Katooni, or I never would have let her climb up there, I know we're supposed to watch out for the younger ones, but Petro wouldn't stop teasing her about being afraid of heights, so she had to show him! And I _caught_ her, she's okay, she didn't land in the ice-nettles, and even Master Tethrendi said there's no real harm done, and I promised to come back during my free hour and help her fix the trellis -- "

"Padawan Tano."

Anyone would shut up when Master Windu said anything in that tone, but... Had she heard him right? She stared at him for a long moment, mouth hanging open, before realizing she hadn't responded. "Yes, master?"

He looked over at Master Yoda, doubt written all over his face, but the small green being just smiled. Rising from his seat, he made his way over to Ahsoka, who knelt to meet him.

"Ahsoka Tano, the rank of Padawan Learner you have achieved." Leaning on his cane with one hand, he opened the other to reveal a simple chain of silka beads with a magnetic clasp at one end. "To Christophsis you will travel, with a message for your master. To Anakin Skywalker you are assigned."

He linked the beads to her headdress. She was a padawan, and everyone would see it. Sunshine streamed into the chamber, and before she could thank him, she was distracted by a human man standing by one window. He reached out to her, saying something she couldn't quite hear --

Ahsoka sat up with a jolt. She was in an actual bed, with an actual pillow and covers. In a medcenter of some kind, it seemed, but tucked away in a small private room. How...?

"Easy." A hand settled lightly on her shoulder. "You're safe here."

She blinked up at the young man who had spoken; he took a second to come into focus. "You were in the Council chamber."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to intrude, but we were starting to worry you'd never wake up." He smiled, warm and encouraging, and familiarity tugged at the edge of her attention. "I'm Luke."

Every instinct said to trust him, and she just stopped herself from responding in kind. Her instincts were not as reliable as they had once been. "Hello."

"You're Ahsoka." His smile never faltered. "Code name Fulcrum."

"And... where exactly is 'here'?"

"I can't say yet. Exactly."

The answer was hardly surprising; his obvious discomfort was. Whoever he was, he didn't like keeping things from her.

"I can tell you you're among friends," Luke offered. "Was 'Alliance to Restore the Republic' official yet when you were last in contact?"

If it was an interrogator's trick, it was a sloppy one. Ahsoka didn't really think it was, but still asked neutrally, "In contact with whom?"

"Fair enough."

A medical droid entered the room and Luke stood and pushed his chair aside, giving it a clear path to her bed.

"Excuse me, sir." The droid's voice was more expressive than most of its type she had encountered. They only got that way through patient contact; she was in experienced hands. "We're very pleased to see you conscious, ma'am. May I ask you some questions?"

Ahsoka nodded, answering on autopilot as it checked her vitals and made basic inquiries about how she felt. Which was... well, better than she had in a long time.

Mostly, though, she was studying Luke, who stood patiently in the corner. At first glance she had thought the lightsaber at his belt was Obi-Wan's. She quickly realized it wasn't identical, but the design was too similar for coincidence, down to the narrow focusing chamber and flared emitter shroud.

In contrast to the thoroughly traditional weapon, he wore trim, tailored black, relieved by a bit of grey lining where the front panel of his shirt was unfastened at one top corner. Of course, if he was a Jedi of any kind -- and the sense of the Force about him left little doubt of that -- it would hardly be wise to look like one. Wearing the saber in plain sight was risky enough.

He was younger than Kanan, too young to have been away from the Temple when it fell. There was only one answer to that riddle: He had never been there.

The implications piled up faster than she could caution herself against them, conjuring hopeful images of Obi-Wan somehow surviving, going into hiding, finding a Force-sensitive child who had gone unnoticed in some far-flung system...

Enough, she told herself sternly. The lightsaber could have come into Luke's possession in any of a dozen ways, not all of them savory. Still, it was obvious someone had taught him _something_ , and she could detect no chill of the Dark Side about him.

A brush against his defenses -- not a challenge to them, though it was unlikely he hadn't sensed it -- told her they were strong but rudimentary. He must have had to drop them almost entirely in order to reach into her mind and draw her out of what 2-1B was informing her had been a six-day coma.

"You reached us in time for bacta treatment to reverse the organ failures and much of the bone loss," it went on, "but it will take time to rebuild your strength."

"I understand."

"We'll see about getting you back on solid food in another day or two. In the meantime, I'm afraid what we have for you is formulated for optimal nutrition rather than flavor."

Ahsoka cracked a smile in spite of herself. "I'm sure I've had worse."

"Very likely," the droid agreed. "Do you have any other questions right now?"

"None that you're authorized to answer, I'm sure."

"I see." The way it turned gave the impression that it cocked its head to one side, despite its lack of the necessary joints. "I'll let you discuss those with the commander, then, and look in on you a little later."

She nodded acknowledgment of this, and when the door had closed behind it, she turned her attention back to Luke. A hint of something like wonder, even awe, shone behind his thoughtful expression.

"He's not kidding about this stuff," he said, holding up a cup of thick beige liquid with a straw in it. "It doesn't smell _bad_ , but... well, it doesn't really smell like much of anything."

Ahsoka shrugged and accepted the dubious-looking meal. "I wasn't kidding either. Right now you could give me a bowl of marinated mulch mold and I'd probably ask for seconds."

"I don't know what that is, and it sounds like I don't want to." He pulled the chair over again, sitting back where he had been when she woke up. "You seem to be in pretty good spirits, all things considered."

"I guess so."

She took several drinks of the bland but inoffensive concoction while considering what to say next. As ingrained as the habit of keeping her guard up was, she kept having to remind herself this man was a stranger, an entirely unknown quantity, for all that he felt like a Jedi. Like kindness, light, hope.

Like home.

Finally she settled for, "So. What happens now?"

"Now you get better, and I wait for medical to clear you for debriefing."

"Why you? Why not -- " She stopped herself before mentioning any names. "Someone I know?"

Sorrow and sympathy flickered across his face and through the Force, but all he said was, "Protocols have changed. I'm told nobody understands that better than you."

_What else has changed?_ She didn't say it, knew any answer he was prepared to give her would be meaningless.

And he was right: She did understand. Secrets were the lifeblood of the Rebellion, and Ahsoka held more than almost anyone. Last seen crossing blades with Darth Vader, brought in half-dead after... how many months?

"The question isn't if I've been broken. You're here to determine how badly."

Nobody was good enough to fake that unfiltered shock. "I don't think you're broken at all."

"That makes one of us." There was that sympathy again, more open this time, and the twinge of almost-familiarity. "We haven't met before, have we?"

"No. I never thought we would."

"That's important to you. Why?"

"You're..." He shook his head. "I'm sorry."

"Protocol."

"Protocol." Taking the empty cup from her, he added, "I'll try to get you something to read, at least. Staring at the walls never helped anybody recuperate."


	14. Chapter 14

"I have no doubt that my patient  _ is _ Ahsoka Tano," Dr. Garren said. "But physiologically, she can't be thirty-five, let alone forty. Chronic malnutrition would affect montral and head-tail growth, but with the rest of her tests... We're talking about seven to ten months, maybe a year, from the healthy Togruta who left Chopper Base."

General Madine frowned. "Could she have been kept in hibernation? Or cloned?"

"We've seen no evidence to substantiate the rumors that the Empire continued illicit cloning operations after the ban," Admiral Ackbar pointed out. "It seems unlikely to suddenly turn up now."

Shaking her head, Garren replied, "None of the telltale genetic markers are present in any case. There are traces of carbonite, but the exposure was much earlier, before her bones were mature."

That was a story Leia was not at all sure she wanted to hear. One ordeal at a time. "So she just, what... skipped over seven years?"

"Maybe," Luke put in.

She shot him a look. "That was a facetious comment."

"I know, but still. You were there, Leia. You saw the gravity readings. It all centered on the ruined structure. If Ahsoka was inside it..." His gaze went distant for a second. "It was almost like it was alive and didn't want to let us leave. But it was also like a gravity well. Like a black hole."

"You're suggesting time dilation?" Ackbar asked.

"Do we have a better explanation?" Luke returned. "Do we need one? A lost hero of the Rebellion has come home. Unless we really believe she's somehow a tool of the Empire -- and I don't -- what does it matter how?"

"It matters. But perhaps not to the question of security," Mon Mothma allowed.

As much as Leia didn't like the circumstances, that much was true. "No. And that's the topic at hand. Luke, you're the only one who's talked to her. Why are you so sure?"

"It feels right for her to be here." He looked frustrated that he couldn't explain it any better than that. Nobody in the room doubted the Force, doubted him, but neither were they used to relying on it this way. "She's confused and wary, just as any one of us would be. I think she wants to trust me. I don't think she quite trusts herself."

Leia nodded. That, she could understand. "Then we should help her with both."

Mon looked around at the other Command Council members, who nodded their assent. "Very well. I take it you two still propose conducting the initial debriefing yourselves?"

"Yes. She's already seen me, even if she wasn't exactly lucid." Leia gave the statement every scrap of  _ this is perfectly reasonable _ she had. "If she really doesn't know how much time has passed, that will be shock enough."

"She was my father's apprentice," Luke added earnestly. "She deserves to know who I am. She deserves to know she's not alone."

Mon acknowledged this with a slight smile. "As do you."

 

* * *

 

Luke's knock at the door was answered by a surprised "Yes?"

He stood in the doorway, blocking Leia from view for the moment, and said, "Hi. We have a lot to talk about. Are you up for it?"

"Sure." The single word sounded like it was meant to be noncommittal, but more than a little relief and apprehension sneaked in.

"How are you feeling?"

"Well, I'm not looking for a sparring partner just yet, but -- "

As Luke pulled the chair to the bedside, Leia's first thought was relief at how much better Ahsoka looked than she had just a week before. She was barely the safe side of frighteningly thin, but her color had returned and her lekku hung smooth and round to her waist.

And she was staring at Leia in unguarded shock.

"I didn't dream you," she half-whispered.

"No." Leia remained standing, at Luke's shoulder. "You woke up on the shuttle, just for a minute. I was there."

Ahsoka nodded slowly, processing this. She looked about to ask something else, but instead took in a sharp little breath, wide eyes looking from Luke to Leia and back again.

"He said his children would come for me," she said uncertainly, searching Luke's face. "I thought I imagined it."

"You didn't," Luke assured her. "We saw him too."

"But how -- " She seemed to consider and discard several thoughts before settling on, "I don't understand."

Luke glanced up at Leia, then asked gently, "Ahsoka, how long would you say you were on Malachor?"

"I honestly don't know." She looked down at her lap, fingers fidgeting with the edge of the blanket. "I tried to come up with a way to keep count, but the light never changed and... Old temples are tricky. You can't always be sure of your perceptions in some of the ancient Jedi sites, let alone a Sith temple. Months, I think. But I don't know how many."

"That's what that ruined pyramid was? A Sith temple?" When she nodded, shoulders pulling in slightly, Luke went on, "And you were there the whole time?"

Ahsoka looked up at him with a frown. "Of course. Believe me, if I'd found a way out of that nightmare factory, I wouldn't have gone back. Why?"

"It was more than months," Leia said. Drawing it out wasn't going to lessen the shock. "You've been presumed dead for over eight years."

"What?" It was more exclamation than question, and she shook her head. "That's impossible."

"I'm learning not to use that word." The rueful smile was just visible on Luke's face from where Leia stood. "Everything keeps proving me wrong."

"Time is different now," Ahsoka said, at least half to herself.

"What's that?" Luke asked.

"Something the... something Anakin said. I asked how long it had been since he left me there, and he said he wasn't sure because 'time is different now.'"

Leia's stomach tightened. "Since  _ he _ left you there."

Realizing what she'd said, Ahsoka again cast an apprehensive gaze back and forth between them. "You two really are...? He has  _ children _ ."

"I've always known his name, but not much more than that," Luke explained. "Leia had no idea. We didn't know about each other until a few months ago."

"We were hidden," Leia added. "I take it you can guess from whom, and why."

Though the shocks kept coming, Ahsoka was quickly recovering her composure, and nodded thoughtfully. "So you already know. What he's become. I'm so sorry."

There was a bit of relief in her tone too -- that she didn't have to be the one to tell them, and perhaps that she didn't have to speak the name aloud. Leia certainly wouldn't want to, in her position.

"Yes." Leia took a deep breath. "And I'm sorry too, but we have to ask you not to tell anyone else."

"What? I can't do that." She tensed warily. "I know it's not easy. Believe me, I know. But it could be critical intelligence. We have to -- "

"It  _ would _ have been critical intel," Leia agreed. "Up until six months ago. He's dead. The Emperor too."

There was still a trace of caution about her -- Leia wasn't the only one who couldn't help waiting for traps to spring, it seemed -- but hope won out. "Then... we won," she breathed.

"Yes," said Luke.

"Essentially," Leia amended. "The Empire was a very large machine with a lot of moving parts. Some of them are still spinning."

"We always expected it would take time," Ahsoka mused. "Though cutting off the head..."

"Is something I probably shouldn't have mentioned before getting a full report from you," Leia said, exchanging a look with Luke. "The personal part... it needs to stay personal. We'll find the right time."

Ahsoka considered this for a long moment, then nodded. "Of course."

"Thank you." Luke's discomfort with the secret didn't keep the genuine gratitude out of his voice. "I know you must have a hundred questions, and we'll get you up to speed as soon as we can. But first we need to hear about what happened to you."


	15. Chapter 15

There were still at least a hundred questions to go when Ahsoka had made what little sense she could of her time inside the Sith temple, and Luke and Leia had in turn given her a summary of the current state of the galaxy and the major events she had missed.

The Empire had ended, with so many dead or missing along the way. They had always expected the price of rebellion to be high, and she had accepted long ago that any farewell might be the last. But all at once... And Alderaan, a haven if not quite a home, where a lost and aimless girl had found true friends and something to believe in again. Not merely stripped and scarred, like so many worlds, but obliterated in an instant.

Leia spoke of it in a steady, practiced voice, her grief so tightly contained that Ahsoka could sense only a hint of it. Self-possessed even as a child, she had become a woman who clearly could command any room she chose, her presence belying her size to a degree that even Padmé might have envied.

Padmé's children. Anakin's  _ children _ .

No wonder Luke had seemed familiar. Precious few, she knew, would see anything of Anakin in his son's warmth and kindness. Maybe no one else alive. Only a fool, though, would overlook the strength beneath it.

That either twin, let alone both, had grown up safe, their power unexploited, was nothing short of astonishing. Ahsoka's own small part in that, even Obi-Wan's long desert vigil, were not enough to explain it.

After all the years the Jedi had blundered in the dark, perhaps the Force had finally obscured something from that scheming old parasite for a change.

Out of all of it, one fact was proving the most difficult to wrap her mind around: Palpatine and Vader were dead. She could feel the truth of it in the Force itself, crossing and colliding waves that could take years to settle in a galaxy suddenly released from the crushing grip of the Sith.

But when she thought,  _ Emperor Palpatine is dead. Darth Vader is dead, _ it didn't feel quite real. Not that she was in the habit of being sure what was real. The thought that all of this was just more illusion had crept in more than once, despite the flow of the Force assuring her moment by moment that she was free.

"And you really saw him? Both of you?"

Luke nodded calmly; Leia looked immensely uncomfortable. But they had just told her Vader was dead, and that meant Anakin was dead.

Ahsoka shook her head. "But that's..."

"Impossible?" Luke finished for her, his little smile both amused and sympathetic. "Why?"

She blinked. Had he really just asked why it was impossible for his dead father to have appeared to them?

Before she could form a reply, he went on, "I mean, I know it's not easy. Ben -- Obi-Wan -- has made that pretty clear. But I saw my father before too, right after he died. That was with Ben and Yoda, but -- "

Ahsoka held up her hands and Luke trailed off, still looking puzzled. Her head suddenly felt like it would burst, and a glance up at Leia told her she wasn't the only one not ready for this conversation.

"Sounds like you two have some complicated Jedi things to discuss." The princess kept her tone impeccably level. "I'll leave you to it. Ahsoka, you'll need to talk with the doctor and with intel before you're cleared for free run of the base, but that doesn't have to be right away."

"Too-Onebee says I'm not going more than a few steps from this bed for at least another day," Ahsoka agreed ruefully. "And honestly, I don't feel much like trying it."

Leia offered a small but genuine smile. "There are a few people waiting to come to you. I don't think you'll be bored."

"I'm sure I won't. Thank you."

The princess took her leave, her brother watching her with a hint of concern.

"I kept thinking if she could see him, maybe it would help," he said. "But not like that. It was a shock."

"I can imagine."

"I guess you can. I'm sorry we had to dump all that on you. If there had been another way..."

"There wasn't. I'd rather know." It was true, though she felt like she'd been awake for about thirty-six hours instead of three, and the headache seemed to be settling in for a long visit.

"When I first heard Ben's voice, I thought I was going crazy. And then when I  _ saw _ him... But Yoda wasn't surprised at all. I just figured it was part of being a Jedi."

"I was taught that death meant becoming one with the Force. It wasn't that our individual consciousness was  _ lost _ ; we just... wouldn't need it any longer."

Luke considered this for a long moment. "That seems like it should be comforting, but..."

"Almost everyone struggled with it," Ahsoka assured him. "I guess there wasn't much point in teaching you that, when they had learned there's another way."

Her head swam with the implications.  _ Just when you think you understand the Force, you find out how little you actually know. _

"There's so much I don't know." He echoed her thought. "I feel like I'm going to spend the rest of my life catching up."

When had humans in their twenties started to look so young? "You don't feel ready to teach," she guessed.

Looking a little startled, he admitted, "I'm not even sure where to begin."

"With your sister, surely?"

Luke half-turned to the door. "She has a lot of other responsibilities. It hasn't been easy to find the time."

"She's afraid." The sharp look he turned back to her was so like Anakin that her breath caught in her throat. "She hides it well, but you must see it."

"She has good reason."

He looked down at his hands, twined in his lap, and belatedly Ahsoka noticed the eddy in the Force around the right one. Impeccably crafted, but not alive.

"I don't know how to -- " Luke cut himself off, shaking his head. "You don't need to hear about my doubts. Your whole universe has just been knocked sideways."

"It's okay. I'm kind of an expert on doubts at this point." She gave a tiny shrug. "Maybe it's good for us. The Jedi were sure they knew the right way, and look where it got us."

"Maybe." He was silent for a long moment, focused on his own thoughts, then looked at her again. "Anyway, I should let you rest."

"I've hardly been doing anything else, not that it seems to matter."

"You've been through a lot. You won't get tired so easily forever."

"I know. Thank you."

He reached for her hand as he stood, and smiled when she accepted the gesture. "The last thing he said to me on Malachor was to bring you home. I hope it feels that way to you soon."


	16. Chapter 16

She still hated him.

Leia didn't use the word, not out loud. Especially not to Luke; she might as well just punch him in the gut.

But it was a fact, and she didn't see it changing any time soon. The hate had been her constant companion for years, long before his death, a hot coal in the pit of her stomach. An outline occasionally flared in its insulating ash, the soulless angles of the mask, but for the most part it smoldered in the background.

As it turned out, it wasn't so easy to ignore when he had a face.

The holorecording was one thing. A certain similarity to Luke, maybe, but really he might have been anyone.

Staring up at her from that cavern, though, transfixed as if she were the ghost... that image was not so easily pushed aside as some. She had stood frozen, part of her mind screaming to reach for her blaster, another that it would do no good, while the lips moved and the hushed voice traveled the impossible distance, crystal-clear.

_"Look at you. I threw away everything but pain and fear, and then I gave them to you. How could I not have seen?"_

Seen what? The consequences of his actions? How, indeed.

That they were connected by blood, by the Force? By a power that didn't care if she understood or wanted it, that marked and changed Luke with every step he took into its mysteries.

By the power that had drilled mercilessly into her mind, probing for secrets she would have died to protect.

By the power that had, she was now certain, enabled her to defy him and keep those secrets safe.

Ironic. Poetic, even.

It made her want to throw up. Or better yet, smash something to bits with something heavy.

All her life she had worked to curb her impatient temper. So much of who she was came from her role as princess, from the values of service and justice she had grown up with. But that fire, everyone had always agreed -- with the occasional rueful shake of the head -- was entirely _Leia_.

Then came Luke's earnest, hesitant revelations. Not just the facts of their heritage, but the attempt to explain what had happened with Vader and the Emperor. How his seemingly inexhaustible hope had been ripped away in ragged strips and rage had so nearly swallowed him whole. How he had kept hammering blindly at a thoroughly beaten Vader as something insisted _this is right, this is just, this is how it must be_.

She believed him when he said saving Vader was the only way to save himself, and she did her best to understand it, she really did. But all she could think was that it _was_ right, it _was_ just, and in his place she would have followed through in a heartbeat.

What did that make her?

She took a deep breath and focused on the datapad in front of her. It didn't make her anything, she told herself firmly, and she had work to do.

 

* * *

 

_" -- adapt the Shien style to your advantage when facing a larger opponent."_

The door was ajar, but Luke knocked lightly anyway.

"Come in."

Ahsoka was out of bed and seated on the chair in the corner, one hand resting on Artoo's dome. Her recognizing the droid hadn't surprised him once he thought about it -- Artoo had been with Leia's family as long as Ahsoka had known them -- but he hadn't expected to learn that she had known him since the start of her apprenticeship.

Luke pushed the door back to its former position after entering, and watched the now-familiar training exercise play out.

"I was too young to see how young he was," she said quietly. "No wonder he sometimes forgot I was just a kid. He wasn't much more than one himself."

Luke circled around the projection and leaned against the wall next to her. "Do you remember recording this?"

"Kind of. I think there was a bet involved."

"A bet?"

"He hated that I preferred the reverse grip," she elaborated. "Said I only got away with it through sheer speed and someday it was going to get me hurt. But it always just made sense to me, and if I could prove why..."

The image of her younger self made her critical mistake, and Ahsoka winced. "Not the proof I was hoping for, obviously."

"Well, I'm impressed," Luke said. "Maybe you can show me, when you're up to it."

"I'd like that." She blinked back tears at Anakin's closing admonition. "Keep your focus. We thought that was enough. We had no idea how bad things already were. Or at least I didn't."

"Do you think he did?"

"I don't know." Her fingertips drummed lightly on Artoo's dome as she considered, and the little droid burbled in response. "He would say 'This isn't practice!' and then start keeping score. Mostly we were fighting mass-produced droids, so it was easy to think of it almost as a game. To think we could win, and then it would all be over and life would go back to normal."

"But it didn't."

"No. It never did. Not just the war, though it was the mechanism for changing everything. That was the hardest thing to understand, even after all the pieces fell into place the way Palpatine wanted them." She shuddered. "It was so much easier for everyone to believe that the Separatists were evil and that was the end of it. If not for your mother, I don't know if I ever would have learned -- what?"

"I didn't even think... of course you would know who she was."

"You mean you don't?" It was Ahsoka's turn to stare. "This whole time... nobody told you?"

"To be fair, I was so caught up in what to do about _him_ , and then..." Luke shook his head. "When I was a kid, Aunt Beru thought it might have been the woman who came home with him when his mother died. But that was only for a couple days. They didn't know anything about her."

"Not even her name?"

"Aunt Beru said she couldn't remember. She and Uncle Owen both avoided the subject of my parents but... that's the only time I ever thought she was actually lying."

"Padmé. Her name was Padmé Amidala." Ahsoka frowned at Artoo. "You used to belong to her, you little -- How could you not tell them?"

The droid's indignant chittering and sputtering was crystal-clear.

"He's right," Luke chuckled. "We never asked."

"Astromech logic," Ahsoka grumbled, but gave the droid an affectionate pat. "He probably saw all kinds of things even I know nothing about, but unless his programming flags them as important, it'll never occur to him to tell us."

Luke nodded. "We need to tell Leia."


	17. Chapter 17

"You've heard of her?"

"I was a little obsessed with her for a while, when I was about twelve," Leia admitted, with a laugh that might have been for Luke's wide-eyed surprise, or her own childhood enthusiasm, or both. "My father let me watch some old holos he had stashed in his office, to give me an idea what the Senate looked like back when its decisions mattered. And there was this woman from Naboo, in the thick of every argument, with her ornate clothes and elegant bearing and all this _passion_."

"That was Padmé, all right," Ahsoka agreed. It was good to see a real smile on the princess' face, and she was glad she had sat cross-legged on her bed to face the twins. Luke had pulled in another chair from somewhere, so they were about as comfortable as they could get in the small room.

"Someone was always trying to silence her," she went on. "I lost count of the assassination attempts. But it only strengthened her resolve."

"She..." Leia paused a moment, her smile taking on an ironic tilt. "She reminded me of my mother."

"She'd be honored by the comparison."

"Did they know each other?" Luke asked.

Ahsoka considered the question, sifting through memories formed while she had been preoccupied with visions foretelling one of those assassination attempts. "They met, at least, when Padmé spoke at a conference on Alderaan. I don't know if they had any other opportunities. Padmé worked closely with Bail in the Senate, but Breha's duties as queen mostly kept her close to home."

"I always wondered why my interest made Father so uncomfortable," Leia said. "He told me Senator Amidala was a friend and she died much too young, but I -- I _knew_ there was more than that. I was sure it had something to do with _me_."

"He claimed he didn't know who your birth parents were. I sensed the lie so strongly, I was worried other people might question it too. I knew he must have a good reason. I never imagined what it really was."

Taking his sister's hand, Luke asked quietly, "How did she die? Do you know?"

Ahsoka shook her head. "I didn't even hear about it for well over a year. They said everyone in Theed lined the streets for her funeral procession, and there were all kinds of rumors about what had happened to her. But I never found out for sure."

The twins exchanged somber looks. There was a long pause, as nobody voiced the thought they must all be having. It was... no. Not her. He _couldn't_.

_"I told myself that, even as I hurt her."_

Leia found her voice first. "I can send a message to Naboo, request their records on her. Disaster recovery is far enough along that someone might be able to spare a little time for it."

"Disaster?" Ahsoka repeated.

"Operation Cinder. A contingency triggered by Palpatine's death. We're still not sure whether it was to cover something up or just pure malice, but his own homeworld was the first target."

Past the lump in her throat, Ahsoka managed, "What happened?"

"A dozen satellites disrupting the atmosphere. We managed to destroy them all, and it could have been so much worse." It sounded like Leia was reminding herself of that. "But the storms still killed hundreds, and thousands more lost their homes. The damage to infrastructure, to historic sites... Rebuilding has been a full-time planetary effort."

"You were there."

"Yes."

" _Right_ there," Luke put in. "It was Leia, a Rebel pilot named Shara Bey, and Queen Soruna herself. Just the three of them, in obsolete fighters, against the satellites and a Star Destroyer."

His tone was pure admiration, and Ahsoka agreed completely, but Leia shrugged off the praise. "I just wish we'd had more warning. We could have saved more."

"Nobody can know everything," said Luke. "Nobody can do everything."

Leia nodded and squeezed his hand before letting it go, but it was apparent she was unconvinced. The sentiment was an all-too-familiar one to Ahsoka. They couldn't do everything, but when they _didn't_ do everything, people died. If she had eventually learned to accept that reality, it hadn't been from Anakin.

"You look like her, but you feel like him."

She was only half-aware that she had mused aloud, until the sense of Leia in the room went deep-space cold, her shields slamming so tightly she seemed to vanish from the Force.

"I'm sorry, I only meant -- "

"No, it's fine."

The nearly imperceptible tremor in Leia's voice said it wasn't fine, not at all. Ahsoka leaned forward and set a steadying hand on the princess' shoulder, and then the world turned inside-out.

Not a single memory, but shards of half a dozen moments fused into a jagged ball of shrapnel: _Pushing driving searing in her head -- "Your defiance means nothing. The galaxy will neither remember nor care." -- cold bench against her cheek, cold everywhere, even on the command deck, how did they stand it? -- screaming screaming couldn't hold it in anymore don't tell don't tell -- pulled back against unyielding armor, implacable weight of hands on her shoulders --_

Ahsoka couldn't help a small gasp, and Leia's eyes went wide as she evidently realized what had happened. Her instinctive defenses sealed again, and she stood abruptly. "You must be exhausted. We should let you rest, we should -- Excuse me."

"Leia."

She held up her hands, shaking her head. "I can't. Please."

"Of course." Ahsoka kept her voice as calm and neutral as possible, resisting the instinct to reach out in reassurance, either physically or through the Force. Right now it could only make things worse.

Luke's support might be more welcome -- she didn't know them well enough yet to be sure -- but he stood by uncertainly, and she couldn't tell what he had sensed or seen.

"I'll look forward to what you hear from Naboo," she said.

Leia nodded, seizing on the attempt to bring the focus back to Padmé. "Me too. I'm sure it won't take long."

"Thank you, Ahsoka," Luke said, confused but staying close by Leia. "We'll see you later."

When the door had closed, Ahsoka pulled up her knees and pressed her back against the head of the bed, concentrating on her breathing until the invisible band around her chest let go.

She had imagined a thousand times, of course, couldn't help it when the Sith temple's shadows had pressed close. What he must have done to those who opposed him, opposed his Emperor. What had been implied in his threat to Ezra. What he might have done to her.

Imagining wasn't the same.

Anakin's relentless determination, twisted into a depth of cruelty she could scarcely comprehend. Turned against his own daughter, against Padmé's living legacy. If he had known, would it have changed anything?

There was no answering that, no way to know what might have been. There was only what was, and the consequences that followed.

_"You would have paid for my mistakes that much sooner."_

They were all still paying for his mistakes. She wondered if they'd ever be done.


	18. Chapter 18

"She said _what_?!"

"Han, stop it." His yelling was actually giving Leia a welcome anchor; the floor seemed properly level for the first time since she'd left the medcenter. But she wasn't about to tell him that. "It's not her fault."

"Like hell it isn't! Where does she get off comparing you to that -- that -- "

"Jedi." Luke had hung back, out of range of Han's fuming, but now he spoke up, quietly but firmly. "Guardian. Teacher. Friend."

Han stared at him for a second, then sputtered, "Hey, wait a minute. I didn't mean -- I know you -- aw, hell."

"Eloquent as always." The laugh felt shaky, and spilled out on its own in a way Leia didn't like, but it was still a huge step back toward normal. Whatever that was these days. "Luke's right. The whole conversation was about how things were before we were even born. That's what Ahsoka was thinking about."

"Lucky her," Han grumbled.

"She had no way of knowing I would -- It just caught me off-guard. It won't happen again."

Luke shook his head. "It's not your fault either."

"We all know whose fault it is," said Han. "It was a lot easier when we could just hate him."

"Han!"

"He's right."

"See?" Han waved a hand in Luke's direction, then frowned at him suspiciously.

"It _was_ easier." Luke crossed his arms, then immediately dropped them back to his sides, forcing tension out of his hands with visible effort. "The wrong way usually is."

"Now, wait just a minute!"

Luke did exactly that, without a word, just that calm, patient look he knew perfectly well would exasperate Han all the more.

Han didn't seem to have a follow-up in mind, but that only stalled him for a few seconds before plowing ahead. "I might not understand all your Force craziness -- hell, I still only half believe stuff I've _seen_ you do -- but you are _never_ gonna convince me this 'Dark Side' can just make somebody into somebody else. Or that it can magically go away and make them the other person again. People don't _work_ that way."

Just a hint of a wince flitted across Luke's face, but he still didn't say anything.

"You think whatever you want, kid," Han went on, "but if you're waiting for me to stop hating him, you're gonna be waiting a long time."

"I'm not." Luke swallowed, then continued just as quietly, "I know it's not that simple, Han. I do. It's just... the only place I have to start from that makes any sense at all."

"Sense!" Han squawked.

"Han." He turned at Leia's sharp tone, face full of surprise that seemed almost too exaggerated to be sincere, even though she knew it was. "Enough."

"But -- "

" _Please_."

Surprise gave way to guilt, and Han stepped back to her side, his protective attitude directed to the universe at large. "Hey. I'm sorry. I just... uh, yeah."

"I know." She set a hand on his arm, acknowledgment and acceptance of his gesture, then turned to Luke. "I'm okay. Really."

He looked more than a little doubtful, but nodded. "Should... should I tell Ahsoka that?"

"I should tell her myself, but for now... Yes. Please. And I'm sorry."

"You have nothing to be sorry about."

"All the same." She reached for his hand, let him draw her into a hug. "I have to deal with this my own way, but you... Let her tell you about who he was. You need that."

"Thank you."

They held on a moment longer, and when they pulled back, he looked over at Han questioningly.

"We're good," Han said, swiping a friendly backhand at him. "You know that."

Luke shook his head with a little laugh. "Yeah."

 

* * *

 

Sure that Leia could draw all the extra strength she needed from Han -- and even more sure that another minute or two would have earned him an earful about worrying too much -- Luke surprised himself with his own reluctance to go back to the medcenter right away.

Maybe he should give it time to settle, he found himself thinking. Maybe Ahsoka could use some space too.

It was the flimsiest of excuses, disintegrating even as he thought it. Ahsoka had been alone enough for a lifetime, and chagrin at her misstep had rippled unmistakably through the Force. Leaving it there would do no good.

There were so many things he wanted to ask -- not just about his father, but about the Force, the Jedi, so much left unknown when his teachers had left him. It was all he could do to hold back the torrent of questions each time he spoke to her, to let her get her bearings in the world first.

None of which would happen without welcoming voices, and more than his. Chewie had visited, he knew, and while he had no idea what they had talked about after all that time, the lift in her spirits had been obvious. Then there was Artoo and his insistence on hovering like a faithful pet, just as he had done for Luke's own stretches in the medbay on Home One.

How many times had the little droid similarly stationed himself at Anakin's bedside, in the aftermath of how many long-ago exploits? More than once Luke had interpreted various noises as Artoo muttering to himself about the folly and fragility of organics. It seemed he had a longer history of observing them than Luke had ever imagined.

Mon Mothma had looked in, but according to Ahsoka the exchange had been brief and formal, with a promise to talk in greater depth later. Self-doubt had lurked beneath the explanation, giving Luke the impression she still didn't expect the Alliance to trust her, even though she had been fully cleared by intel.

He _wanted_ to talk to her. He wanted to hear any stories she was willing to tell.

Didn't he?

 _"I know it's not that simple,"_ he had just said to Han. Ahsoka had made it clear she knew that too, and for all her experience of both Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader, of master and enemy, she seemed no closer to resolving the contradictions than anyone else.

The longer he waited to ask, the longer it was still possible she had the answers.

Just as he acknowledged that thought as the thing that was slowing his steps, a burst of thumping and banging and colorful cursing in a mix of Basic and Mando'a drew him toward the medcenter at a run.

He reached the door and was bracing himself and the medic careening in that direction almost before he registered what was happening.

"Thanks," the woman said with a quick nod. Balance regained, she shrugged and tossed her head slightly until her lekku hung straight behind her, then reached open hands toward the agitated patient a few paces away. "It's okay, Captain. We're here to help you. Do you remember who I am?"

Dark eyes narrowed suspiciously in a lined, weathered face. The old veteran from the Endor strike team, the one Luke had noticed studying him oddly a few times. Rex, that was it. Han had reluctantly removed the man from the Pathfinder roster after a forgotten code phrase had nearly blown a mission. Occasionally Luke still ran into him leading training sessions, his combat skills as sharp as ever though he was increasingly unlikely to know what year it was or what planet he was on. Apparently this was a bad day.

For a second it looked like he might recognize the medic, then his grip tightened on the metal tray he held in both hands as a shield. "Don't know any of you! How'd I get here?"

"I'm Chuna," she reminded him calmly. "You see me every week."

Rex frowned. "You... you stick my head in that machine."

"That's right. We need to scan your brain, to understand what's happening to you."

One hand clutched the tray even tighter while the other reached up to finger the ridge of scar on his scalp above one ear. "What did those long-necked -- Is this General Ti's orders? I want to see her!"

"General Ti isn't here." Chuna clearly had no more idea who that was than Luke did, but she continued to answer as if Rex were making perfect sense. "It's just a scan, Captain, then I'll show you back to your quarters."

She began to step toward him and he reacted like lightning, flinging the tray straight at her head. Acting on instinct, Luke raised a hand and stopped it just short of her, then plucked it from the air and set it on a nearby table.

Patient and medic both stared openmouthed for a second, then Rex snapped to attention. "General! Apologies, sir, I..." His posture didn't change, but confusion clouded his features. "I... uh... who are you?"

"I'm Luke." He exchanged a glance with Chuna, then added, "At ease, Captain."

"Sir." The old soldier barely relaxed, hands behind his back, and Luke moved deliberately over to him, righting a toppled chair and moving it out of the way. There was a flash of something through the Force, a chorus of children's voices, all alike: _Good soldiers follow orders._ "I'm sorry, sir, I... don't know what -- Commander?"

At first Luke thought Rex had remembered him, or at least his actual rank, but the man's gaze was directed behind him.

He turned to find Ahsoka, standing perfectly still with one hand braced on the doorframe of her room, as Rex went on, "When did you get so tall?"


	19. Chapter 19

As the platform he was lying on slid him into the scanner down to his shoulders, Rex grumbled something Ahsoka couldn't quite make out, but remained as calm and cooperative as he had been since catching sight of her.

She clung to her own calm, for his sake, though she couldn't seem to stop shaking. She was half surprised it didn't rattle her chair. Surely Luke could feel it, standing behind her with a comforting hand on her shoulder. 

Was the gesture born of instinct, she wondered, or had he had enough time to pick up the habit from Obi-Wan? Such a simple touch, safely within the bounds of Jedi reserve and military decorum, yet it could carry so much.  _ I am here for you _ , it said, in reassurance or pride or pure soul-warming affection.

When she couldn't help thinking of the long-lost lifeline between master and padawan, that was always the shape in her mind.

Poisoned and corrupted, the same shape in Leia's mind signified terror, helplessness, unspeakable loss. Consciously or not, Luke seemed to understand that; of all she had seen of the twins' easy closeness, there had been nothing that might trigger those traumatic memories as Ahsoka had unwittingly done.

"It's dark." The acoustics inside the scanner made Rex's voice sound hollow and unreal. "Don't like it."

The childishness of it raised a lump in Ahsoka's throat; somehow she forced steady words past it. "It's only for a few minutes, Rex."

"You're almost finished, Captain," the Twi'lek medic agreed. "Please keep still."

The next two and a half minutes stretched to the breaking point; she could only imagine how long it must feel to the confused man in the dark. Finally, though, the platform slid him out again, and he sat up, blinking as Chuna removed the visor over his eyes.

"See, Captain," she said with a smile, "that wasn't so bad."

"I guess." Rex waved aside the hand she offered, hopping off the platform under his own power. 

Much of what he'd called "padding" had been lost since Ahsoka had seen him last, along with a noticeable amount of the muscle beneath it, and there was a slight stoop in his spine. But he was still a long way from weak or frail -- at the moment, she was a lot closer -- and when she stood up to hug him there was only a second's hesitation before he squeezed half the air out of her.

She would happily have made do with squished lungs for much longer, but Rex pulled back with a frown, saying, "I told 'em soldiers' rations aren't enough for a growing..."

He trailed off, frown deepening, and Ahsoka assured him, "Don't worry about me, Rex. They're taking good care of me."

"You're all grown up." He shook his head. "I... I knew that, didn't I?"

"Yes."

"We removed the chips. We didn't kill our Jedi." His focus seemed far away for a moment, as if he were saying it to someone else.

"That's right." Ahsoka swallowed. "You gave me the chance to grow up. You got me away, on Mandalore. Do you remember?"

"Mandalore." He repeated it deliberately, as if the name itself were unfamiliar, then said again, "We didn't kill our Jedi."

"You didn't," Ahsoka agreed. "You kept me safe."

He smiled and rubbed at the back of his neck, the old giveaway that he felt awkward, out of his depth. "Keep an eye on her, General Skywalker says. Even if she thinks she doesn't need it. Just don't tell her I said so."

She had no doubt Anakin had said exactly that, probably more than once. She tried to say something to that effect, but all that came out was a little choked sound. Reaching back toward the chair, she found Luke's hand instead, and he placed it at the center of her back to lend her stability.

Chuna stepped in then, smoothly taking Rex's arm. "We should let Agent Tano rest now, Captain. You can come back and see her later."

He looked about to argue, then asked, "Commander?"

Ahsoka nodded. "It's fine, Rex," she managed. "Go with her."

"Well, all right then." He nodded to Luke. "Sir."

He looked back twice as Chuna led him out, and Ahsoka kept her feet and her smile just long enough. When the medcenter door had closed behind them, she let her quaking knees give way and sank back into the chair. She was aware of Luke crouched beside her, his hand still on her back as ragged gulping breaths shook her whole frame and hot tears spilled into her lap.

Finally, gradually, the pressure in her gut and behind her eyes eased, diminished, disappeared. The Force flowed into the hollow space it left behind, quiet and steady, and she drew on it gratefully for a long moment before wondering if its living conduit understood what he was doing.

So much power with so little training. She had known masters twice his age who would never have handled it with such grace.

She took a deep breath and sat up straight, and saw relief cross the open young face looking up at her. "You okay?"

"Yes. Thank you."

"Of course." Luke glanced in the direction Rex had gone. "The reports on my father's datachip. He mentioned a Captain Rex, but I didn't make the connection. I didn't know he -- I don't really know him, but I don't think he talks much about where he came from."

"Would you?"

He considered this for a moment. "Probably not. Then again, plenty of people around here don't. And I was raised to not press the subject."

Ahsoka's knowledge of Tatooine was limited, but enough that she wasn't surprised by that. "When he was with Phoenix Squadron, it wasn't a secret, but he didn't go out of his way to tell people either. As the Rebellion grew -- well, I can see where it could get awkward."

"Yeah. We have some people who remember the early days of the Empire, before the clone troops were decommissioned." Luke grimaced. "To be honest, I always kind of figured that meant they were killed."

"I don't think there were very many left by then. They weren't  _ designed _ for the long term."

Luke didn't miss the bitter emphasis. "It all seems so... unnatural. It's hard to understand why people went along with it."

"I was there and I don't understand it. Well, not  _ there _ ," she amended. "Not where the decisions were being made. But still... the Senate, the  _ Jedi _ , agreed to it. Hundreds of thousands of disposable men."

Her voice was starting to shake again, and Luke frowned slightly. "Do you want to go back to your room? This has to have been draining."

"Honestly? I'm not sure what I want," Ahsoka answered, trying and failing to collect her scattered thoughts. "I don't think I could sleep any more right now. Meditation would be wise, but... well, I'm out of practice, and it's hard here. Even with the private room."

He nodded, then stood up and held out a hand. "Are you up for a short walk, do you think?"

"As long as you're ready to help if it turns out I'm not. Why? What do you have in mind?"

"There's something I want to show you." Whether from her expression or the Force, he picked up on her puzzlement and curiosity, and added, "A piece of home, kind of. Your home, that is. Though it's starting to feel like... well, let's just go see?"

It didn't make much sense, but obviously he was aware of that, and really just getting out of the medcenter for its own sake was enough for Ahsoka. "Okay."


	20. Chapter 20

"Please forgive the interruption, Your Highness, Ambassador."

Absorbed by the draft document on the desk, they had somehow both managed to miss C-3PO entering Leia's office, and jumped a little when he announced himself.

The droid's hands jerked up in dismay. "Oh! I do beg your pardon. I didn't mean to startle you."

"No harm done," Leia said. "What is it, Threepio?"

"You have a private holocomm transmission from Naboo. It's Queen Soruna."

"The queen? She's waiting now?"

"Yes, ma'am. I understand you're not to be disturbed during meetings, but under the circumstances -- "

"Yes, Threepio, this is definitely an exception." She turned to Jasseel. "I'm so sorry, but I need to take this right away."

They nodded and rose to leave. "Of course. I hope it's not bad news?"

"I don't think so," Leia assured them. "Please excuse me. Threepio, will you transfer the signal in here?"

"Certainly, Your Highness."

When the door had closed behind them, Leia turned on the holo and greeted the smiling face of Sosha Soruna. "Your Majesty. It's good to see you."

"And you, Princess."

"I have to say, I didn't expect you to respond personally to my inquiry. Is everything all right?"

"Better every day, thank you," the queen replied. "Any request for personal data regarding a predecessor must be brought to the attention of the sitting monarch. And when I saw that it came from you... Well, I have to admit I was curious. In any case, it feels like far too long since we spoke."

"It does," Leia agreed. "But... predecessor?"

"Queen Amidala served two terms before she represented Naboo in the Republic Senate. The Empire did its best to erase her significance, but she remains a much-loved figure."

Leia blinked. "I had no idea."

"May I ask what prompted the inquiry?"

"My interest is personal." It was a near-meaningless placeholder, and the queen, trained in the same rhetorical traditions, no doubt recognized it as such. Those same traditions demanded patience with it, and she waited with a neutral expression of interest until Leia went on, "I don't recall whether I've mentioned to you that I was adopted."

"No. I can't think why you would have had a reason to." The curious tilt of Soruna's head was all but imperceptible, if not for the way it set the tassels on her headdress swaying. "Is there a reason now?"

Leia took a deep breath. "I'm afraid this will sound more presumptuous and... well, opportunistic than I would have thought five minutes ago. But I've been given reason to believe Padmé Amidala was my birth mother."

"You're sure?"

"As sure as I can be. The source of the information is highly reliable."

A bright, delighted grin blossomed incongruously on the formally painted face. "But that's wonderful! You must visit as soon as your duties permit. I'll see to the records at once, of course, and contact her family -- "

Even as her heart skipped a beat at the word  _family_ , Leia protested, "Please, Your Majesty, I don't want to divert anyone from the work of rebuilding. Your people's needs must come first."

"Of course they do. Don't you see?" Soruna shook her head. "Naboo produced the tyrant. The Empire took root in our soil, and we are left to grapple with that shame. If one of the heroes of Storm Day, one of the greatest heroes of the Rebellion, is one of our own by birth... Can you imagine what that will mean?"

Leia hadn't considered it from that perspective, and silently chided herself for letting it take her by surprise. She had imagined a quiet, private inquiry, but that was unlikely now, especially once it came up -- and it would have to come up -- that Naboo could suddenly claim _two_ heroes of the Rebellion as its children. At least one of whom was already less than comfortable with his celebrity status.

As if reading her mind, the queen went on, "I'm sorry, Princess, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Of course nothing will be made public without your approval. And of course Senator Amidala's family here must be consulted as well."

"Of course," Leia agreed.

There was that word again. _Family_. Not so long ago, it had meant something blown out of the sky and out of her reach forever. Then, without meaning to, she had begun to find herself mentally attaching it to Luke, Han, Chewie. In a different way, to the Rebellion as a whole.

Now it seemed as if Luke's revelations on Endor had set off a cascade of family tumbling unexpectedly from a clear sky. A twin brother. A sort of honorary aunt. A shadow father and mirage mother, both more real by the day and all the more confounding for it.

"They have a right to know who is asking and why," Leia went on. "I'll look forward to what they have to say."

"I should be able to call again within a few days," the queen assured her. "I hope I have the chance to offer you our hospitality again soon."

"I'd like that." That much, at least, was uncomplicatedly true.

* * *

The distance from the medcenter to Luke's quarters was insignificant to an active, healthy person. Keeping to a careful pace, Ahsoka just managed it, steadying herself on his arm a few times without quite leaning. Frustration pulsed from her each time, just for a moment, and at first he thought she was masking or suppressing it. Then, as she faltered just at his door, he all but saw a dark cloud break up and dissipate into the Force.

"We're here." He opened the door and gestured her in, continuing, "Sorry it's kind of a mess. Things have been pretty hectic."

Ahsoka gave him a wan smile. "I'm hardly in a position to judge anyone's living quarters, even if I were inclined to."

"I keep thinking there's some sort of standard I should be upholding in... well, everything. Except I don't even know what it is. It's silly, I guess."

"I haven't been a Jedi for a long time," she reminded him quietly. "Sometimes I wonder if I ever... Oh."

Her eyes went wide as she turned toward the small stasis generator tucked into one corner, and the tree cutting suspended above it. She crossed the room on surer feet than Luke had yet seen and raised one cautious hand a few centimeters from the field. "Even in stasis," she murmured.

"So it's not just wishful thinking," Luke said. "You feel it too."

"Yes."

"I worry if I'm doing the right thing, keeping it this way. But until I know where it should be planted..."

"It's fine." There was a calm certainty in the two little words. "If it were wrong, you would feel it."

"That's what I thought. It's just... there's so much I don't know."

"You know to trust your feelings. If Obi-Wan and Master Yoda had so much as an hour, they taught you that."

"They tried, anyway," he agreed with a rueful little chuckle.

Ahsoka pulled her attention from the scrap of tree to study him curiously. "It felt wrong when you found it. _He_ had it."

Luke nodded. "I don't know what for. Just studying, or trying to corrupt them somehow?"

"Them?"

"There were two pieces. I didn't expect that, but I was glad of it. There was a pilot who went with me, Shara Bey. She and her husband were about to muster out, so I sent the other one with her." He smiled. "She just sent me a holo the other day, of it planted by their house on Yavin 4. It's growing even faster than their son."

"It's known more generations of children than anyone can count." Her eyes held the sheen of tears as she turned back to the little tree and sank gracefully to sit on her heels. "They'll grow strong together, and it will hold his secrets safe."

Luke sat on the floor beside her. "It certainly seems to have held whatever secrets the Emperor tried to wring out of it."

"Palpatine never met anyone or anything he didn't try to use for his own ends. And what he couldn't use, he destroyed." Ahsoka held her hand up again, curling it slightly around the faint tendrils of the Force that somehow reached beyond the stasis field. "But here you are, old friend, alive and waiting for new younglings to shelter."

"The tree and I have that in common," Luke mused. "Except I didn't have to survive him nearly as long as it did."

"Good."

There was a hard knot of feelings under the little word, and he asked without thinking, "What about you?"

"Well, you know about my trial. Before that... I met him a few times, in passing, but I met the Chancellor. The façade. Except once." She shuddered. "He looked at me like I was something he scraped off the bottom of his shoe. I felt so small, and so _cold_."

Luke nodded; he recalled that feeling too clearly for comfort.

"And then it was like I wasn't there at all. Anakin didn't say a word when they left me outside the office, barely even glanced at me. It felt like the Chancellor was taking him away from me, but I told myself that was just petty and childish."

"Only it wasn't."

"Well, it _was_ , a bit," Ahsoka admitted ruefully. "It had been a rough few days, and I was sick of being treated like a child. It didn't exactly help to know I had earned it."

"And you _were_ a child."

She slanted a questioning look at him. "Yes."

"If you had trusted your perceptions... what could you have done?"

"I don't know." She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I've asked myself that a hundred times, late at night when I couldn't sleep. If I had tried to tell the Council there was something wrong, would they have listened? Would Anakin, when he had so much respect for the Chancellor? If he had listened, would Palpatine have found a way to get rid of me?"

The matter-of-fact way she laid it out sent a chill up Luke's spine.

By contrast, her next question was uncertain and subdued. "Should I have tried anyway?"

"I don't have an answer for that," Luke said. "I don't think anybody could."

"Maybe not. In my experience, that means I'm asking the wrong question."

"Okay. So what's the right one?"

"Sometimes there isn't one." Ahsoka shifted slightly to find an easy balance with her hands on her knees, and closed her eyes. "Sometimes we need to just listen."

Fair enough.

Luke settled into his own accustomed spot, reached out for the Force rippling through through room and out into the galaxy, and listened.


	21. Chapter 21

When Leia returned to her quarters from a Command Council meeting for which she had been about half present, there was a message waiting for her from Queen Soruna with a bundle of public records attached and a promise of more to follow.

She skimmed through the images first, forming an overview of Senator Amidala's career on which to arrange details later.

In the earliest ones, there seemed to be nothing there but the armor of massive robes and the mask of ceremonial face paint. It wasn't long, though, before they showed their true use, not only to obscure the vulnerabilities of the small girl inside but to amplify her. It was the direct opposite of Leia's early days in the Senate, when she had so often been underestimated and turned that to her advantage.

There was no underestimating the Queen of Naboo. Her appearance did not demand respect; every centimeter presumed it.

Leia had observed that strategy in person with two queens, one reigning as a figurehead under the Empire, the other now leading her people out of its shadow. Padmé Amidala had used it to full effect, until the young woman in the next image, posing beside the new queen as she accepted her appointment to the Senate, seemed to be someone else entirely.

This was the figure Leia remembered from her father's precious cache of Senate recordings. Here she was standing on the steps of the palace in Theed, addressing her own people, reassuring them in the wake of a thwarted biological warfare plot that had sought to unleash the long-eradicated Blue Shadow virus on an unprepared galaxy.

She gestured to her right, and to Leia's surprise the image shifted focus momentarily to Ahsoka, very young and a bit embarrassed by the attention... and her master standing behind her, glowing with pride.

The projection snapped off before Leia was entirely aware she had reached for the switch. Heart racing, she closed her eyes, willing away the tightness in her chest and the instinct to run.

She couldn't keep doing this. If she wanted to learn about where they had come from -- even if she just wanted to not shut Luke out while he did so -- she couldn't pick and choose. He was part of the story. His face would keep turning up.

The face from the datachip, from her nightmare, from Malachor.

_"I threw away everything but pain and fear."_

Vader was Anakin was Vader... and he wasn't.

He was so much less.

The thought hit her with a jolt. The unstoppable giant who had terrorized those unfortunate enough to see him in action, whose dark presence had filled rooms and haunted her nightmares... he was _less_.

Her hand shook as she reached for the holoprojector switch, but she flipped it back on, freezing the image, and faced it straight on.

From where Leia sat, this young man's path led to only one horrific conclusion, because she had already lived through it. But the sun-gilded instant suspended before her held every possibility in the universe.

The door chime startled her nearly out of her skin. She was about to turn the projector off again, but stopped at Han's "Hey, it's just me" on the other side of the door.

"Come in," she called out in reply.

He frowned as he crossed the room, but pulled up a chair behind hers and looped his arms loosely around her. Nodding toward the projection, he said, "Something like this going on, I figured Luke would be behind it. Where is he?"

"His quarters, I think." Leia shook her head. "This is all me. And Queen Soruna. I was looking through some records she sent on Senator Amidala and, well."

"Can't get away from him," Han grumbled.

"I was just thinking something similar. And... maybe I shouldn't."

"Hey. Just because Luke can't leave it alone..."

"No, it's not that." Before he could reply, she went on, "And it's not Ahsoka either. Well, not _just_ her."

"What, then?"

He tucked his chin over her shoulder, and she leaned her head against him a little. "I've been hiding all my life. Even when I didn't know it. Maybe it's time to stop."

Han's arms tightened around her, and she put a hand over his to squeeze back. "So that's her. The one they couldn't shut up."

Leia chuckled. "Yes."

"Do you think..." His embrace went a little too tense, just for a second. "Do you think he really loved her?"

She didn't answer for a long moment, still searching the shapes hanging in the air for answers no mere image could provide. All it could say for sure was _once there was more_.

"I think... I'm starting to."

"Okay." The reluctance in his tone was unmistakable, but turned teasing in the next breath. "Damn. Am I gonna end up having to admit Luke was right?"

Leia laughed out loud at that. _"Someone must have loved him once,"_ Luke had said, staring into the embers of the bonfire as dawn broke over Endor. _"I mean, here we are."_ She and Han had exchanged incredulous glances over his head, but said nothing, not where he could hear.

"You might. Think you can handle it?"

"I don't know. The kid's kind of a know-it-all, it can be pretty hard to -- no, no, wait a minute. That's his sister."

"Hey!"

Han shifted his chair around to her side and put two fingers under her chin, drawing her to face him. "Good thing I love her."

She felt her mouth curving into a smile of its own accord as he leaned in. "Uh-huh. Very good thing."

Kissing him, everything felt cockeyed and everything felt right. They shouldn't have fit, not for a dozen reasons, but they did, so completely it was hard to remember why she had ever questioned it.

She was half in his lap when the kiss finished, and the way they held each other made the slightly awkward perch easy and comfortable.

"A guy could get used to this." His voice still held a trace of that teasing note.

"Just don't start taking it for granted," Leia returned.

"Wouldn't dream of it." With a slight sigh, he added, "Not like I'm gonna get a chance to any time soon anyway."

"Oh." She had figured this might be coming. "The Naraka mission. You're heading out?"

He grimaced. "Tomorrow. I can put it off, say we need to double check the intel, if you -- "

"No. If what we got about high-level Imperials holing up in the prison is true, the more time we give them to plot, the more dangerous they'll be."

"I know."

"I want it all to be over too," she said. "I want to concentrate on building things new, the way they should be. We'll get there."

"Yeah."

"Until then... We have tonight. And all this..." She nodded toward the frozen holo image. "What answers there are to find, I'll find. We'll find. We'll manage."

He didn't look convinced, but nodded, and she reached over to turn off the holoprojector.

"Now." She turned to face him fully, her smile returning. "About tonight."


	22. Chapter 22

As far as Ahsoka knew, nobody ever told the younglings to take their troubles to the Great Tree, but they all seemed to find their way there sooner or later. Though it didn't look like much on the surface, if you stretched out with the Force you could feel its ancient roots reaching deep into the soil and spreading nearly to the perimeter of the gigantic Temple structure. On a planet teeming with life, virtually all of which careened rootless through its urban canyons, the tree was the one truly grounded thing you could always find.

When she had walked down the Temple steps for the last time, she had reached for those roots, drawing the strength to hold her head high and never look back.

The physical roots must be long dead beneath what had become the Imperial palace, their connection to sunlight and air ripped away. But through the forlorn-looking remnant in this small room, she could sense a root system not merely encompassing the grounds of one temple but spanning star systems, to its twin flourishing on Yavin IV and beyond. The Emperor's efforts to bend it to the purposes of the Sith had come to naught, just as they had with Luke.

Old tree in a new shape. New Jedi seeking old wisdom.

And out in the galaxy, touched by the Force, they waited. The hidden, the lost, the younglings. Flickers of light along the great network of roots, connecting back to the sleeping tree and the young man charged with leading them along paths unknown.

Far into the darkest spaces between the stars the roots reached, the most delicate threads extending to the edge of the galaxy and beyond. One came into sharp focus, curiously familiar though she could not begin to say what set it apart from any other. Ahsoka followed its shimmering length, stars passing at a blur, until it stretched into a mass of utter blackness and absolute cold.

_ "No farther."  _ The vibration along the thread was almost nothing but a hum, the barest shape of words.  _ "My price. My task. Go back." _

The message was spare, even abrupt, but the burst of feeling that escaped the darkness along with it was all concern and love and... hope.

_ Anakin? _

Her awareness snapped back to the boundaries of her own body and mind. She opened her eyes but remained motionless, watching tiny hints of expression flicker across Luke's face as he sat enveloped in the Force. Faint crease of a frown between his brows, fleeting twitch of a smile at one corner of his mouth.

It wasn't fair, what was asked of him, but then "fair" had always been an ideal to work and fight for, never a given.

There was nothing fair about what they had expected of Anakin either. It wasn't supposed to be common knowledge, but sharp young ears always heard more than their elders intended, and rumors about a prophecy and a "Chosen One" had swirled among the initiates long before the already half-mythic figure at their center was named as her master.

Ahsoka had sensed the weight on him without understanding it, so often filtered through the self-centered prism of adolescence. All the times she had bristled at his need to protect her, especially after... The hole in her memory of their experience on Mortis had never been filled with more than a faint echo of anger and a bitter taste in her mouth. But the fervent hug, the torrent of relief and gratitude laced with residual panic and shame, clumsily smothered up a second later -- that was etched in durasteel.

Anakin had counted them as failures, she knew, the fleeting glimpses she had caught of what lay behind his confidence. She hadn't been able to tell him, hadn't really understood at the time, how important those glimpses were to the person she had become. How much more she had learned at the side of a master who didn't have all the answers, who had invited her to find the answers with him.

How much it mattered to feel that she had made him a little less alone.

It wasn't enough, could never have been enough, and too many pieces were lost to even guess at whether or when "enough" had been possible. But it had mattered.

Now another weight was settling on his son, setting him apart and alone in the midst of those who loved him. The last of the Jedi.

_ "I'm not even sure where to begin." _

She was no Jedi; of that she was still certain. But a source of knowledge and support, as she had been for Kanan and Ezra... that much she could offer.

What Luke would build from the pieces he could gather was entirely up to him. The need for it to be different from the Jedi Order she had known seemed self-evident to her, but it wasn't her task. Whether it would be something Ahsoka could count herself part of again, or whether that was something she even wanted, she couldn't say.

She could make him less alone. It wasn't enough, not on its own. But it mattered.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The walk to the medcenter took less time on the way back, with Ahsoka leaning on him less and hardly pausing at all. Luke had emerged from his meditation to find her watching him thoughtfully, and they had said little to disturb the quiet balance that seemed to lend her strength.

As they entered, Chuna looked up from her computer terminal with a smile. "How are you feeling, Agent Tano?"

"Better, I think," Ahsoka answered. "It was good to get out a little. No offense."

"None taken," the medic assured her with a chuckle. "It's a peculiar sort of hospitality, I suppose. Everyone is happiest when the guest is ready to leave. Next thing you know, you'll be in regular quarters and just visiting us for checkups."

"That would be nice."

"If you like, I can put in the request tomorrow," Luke offered. "It'll probably take a few days to get everything in order anyway."

Ahsoka thought a second, then nodded. "Yes. Thank you."

When they were back in her room, out of Chuna's earshot, Ahsoka asked, "So what did you learn? Anything you can articulate?"

"I don't know." He shrugged. "Lately it's just been a sense of how big it all is. Like there's this enormous system, not exactly a machine or an organism, but something like both, and something else too. So vast I can't tell where it ends, if it ends at all. But so interconnected, and so delicately balanced in some places. Like everything will start spinning in a different direction if you give it the slightest push at the right point."

She nodded. "Or the wrong one."

"Or the wrong one," he agreed.

"Does it scare you?"

"Sometimes. Sometimes I think it doesn't scare me enough."

Ahsoka nodded again, but didn't say anything.

"And I know that's not good, that I need to get rid of the fear. Release it to the Force, Yoda said. But I don't understand how to do that."

"I used to wonder that all the time," she said thoughtfully. "It took a long time to understand that it wasn't about getting rid of it. The feelings we were taught to beware of... It's not about getting rid of them. They're there. They're real. It's about accepting that, but not letting them control our choices. That's how we move past them."

Luke let this sink in, nodding slowly. "That makes sense, I think. I wish Ben and Yoda had explained it that way."

"I don't know if anyone but Anakin really thought about it that way, not consciously. I got the impression he had figured it out for himself. It made all the difference to me, but... I don't think he ever quite managed to learn it as well as he taught it."

"I guess not."

Ahsoka reached up and set a hand on his shoulder, and impulsively he wrapped her in a hug. 

Hugging back, she said, "You'll find your way. I'm sure of it."

"I'll need all the help I can get," he said ruefully as they stepped back.

"You'll have it."

"Thanks." Every time he visited in hopes of helping her recover, Luke seemed to come away feeling better too. "I'll put in that request for quarters. Good night."

"Good night."

**Author's Note:**

> I really shouldn't ask myself idle questions like "How would Luke and Leia react if they could see how Anakin was with Ahsoka?" But since I did, I'm endlessly grateful for friends like Amilyn and BlueMorpho for keeping me on track along the ever-expanding way, and especially for helping me find my way into Leia's head.


End file.
